Latest reviews – Page 441
-
Reviews
A Dirty Shame
After the laboured comedyof Cecil B Demented, it's reassuring to find John Waters on morefamiliar terrain in A Dirty Shame, a dirty sex comedy which really isgood clean fun. Already slapped with an NC-17 rating in the US by the MPAA, thefilm's gleefully flagrant bad language and sexual situations will ...
-
Reviews
Head In The Clouds
Dir/scr: John Duigan.Canada-UK. 2004. 132mins.Head In The Clouds aims to be asweeping romantic epic but it falls short, the victim of a fatal lack of energyand a scale that cannot live up to the film's ambitions. Set in Europe as itbuckles under Fascism, it's the story of an untenable love ...
-
Reviews
Going Upriver: The Long War Of John Kerry
Dir. George T. Butler.US. 2004. 130mins.The 2004 US presidential election is widely considered oneof the most divisive in memory, mostly the result of polarity between those whosupport the US-led invasion of Iraq and those who consider it an error equivalentto that nation's adventure in Vietnam a generation ago.A number of ...
-
Reviews
Innocent Voices (Voces Inocentes)
Dir. Luis Mandoki. Mexico. 2004. 120mins.Luis Mandoki, the Mexican film-maker whohas built a comfortable career around middling Hollywood melodramas such as WhenA Man Loves A Woman and Message In A Bottle, returns to his LatinAmerican roots with a powerful true story about a young boy growing up in themidst of ...
-
Reviews
Yesterday
Dir. Darrell James Roodt.S Africa. 2004. 91mins.Yesterday, DarrellJames Roodt's touching and only too familiar African tragedy, which claims tobe the first Zulu-language feature, has more to offer than unfamiliar language,spectacular landscapes and a touch of exoticism.Without entering any of thepolitical minefields that many films about South Africa (Forgiveness, CountryOf My ...
-
Reviews
Bride And Prejudice
Dir: Gurinder Chadha.UK-India-US. 2004 111mins.Bollywood spectacle andBritish comedy of manners collide head on in Gurinder Chadha's Bride AndPrejudice, an entertaining if wildly uneven updating of Jane Austen'snovel.Chadha throws Indian,English and American characters into the mix, cheerfully trading in allavailable national stereotypes as she goes. Much grates. The direction is oftensurprisingly ...
-
Reviews
Ladder 49
Dir:Jay Russell. US. 2004. 115mins.America'spost-September 11 love affair with the figure of the heroic firefighter getsthe big screen treatment in Ladder 49, a character-driven action dramapairing a boyish Joaquin Phoenix with a fatherly John Travolta. The pairingworks well enough and the drama is sensitively handled by director Jay Russell(My Dog ...
-
Reviews
Crash
Dir:Paul Haggis. US. 2004. 100mins.Whilethe mini-genre it occupies - multi-storylined ensemble pieces aboutdysfunctional life in southern California - is already well-established (see ShortCuts, Magnolia), Crash is a superb, sometimes literallybreath-taking new addition to this august group.First-timefeature director Paul Haggis (a native of Canada who has lived in Los Angelesfor a ...
-
Reviews
Three Extremes
Dirs: Fruit Chan, ParkChan-Wook, Takashi Miike. HK-Jap-S Kor. 2004. 127mins.The second of twothree-part omnibus films at this year's Venice Film Festival (the other was theWong Kar-Wai/Soderbergh/Antonioni collaboration Eros), Three Extremes is a tasty showpiece forthree of Asia's hottest directors. In market terms, they are a well-chosen trio- far more so ...
-
Reviews
Turtles Can Fly (Lakposhtha Ham Parvaz Mikonand)
Dir/scr:Bahman Ghobadi. Iran-Iraq, 2004. 95mins.Fouryears after he first emerged on the international scene, first as an actor inSamira Makhmablaf's Blackboards, then as director of A Time ForDrunken Horses, Bahman Ghobadi returns with Turtles Can Fly.Thestory is again located in Ghobadi's native Kurdistan and deals once more withthe tragic misery of ...
-
Reviews
Brothers (Brodre)
Dir: Susanne Bier. Den. 2004. 110minsThe consequences of love and the personal trauma ofglobal conflict prove a potent combination in Brothers. The latestcollaboration between Open Hearts director Susanne Bier and screenwriterAnders Thomas Jensen takes the stuff of cheap melodrama and transforms it intoa heartfelt human drama.Once again their collaboration is ...
-
Reviews
The Tulse Luper Suitcases, Part 3: From Sark To Finish
Dir/scr:Peter Greenaway. Neth-Sp-Lux-Hung-It-Ger-Russ. 2004. 120mins.Youmay, to paraphrase a football commentator, have thought it was all over. Wellit is now. The final part of Peter Greenaway's seven-hour Tulse Luperopus, From Sark To Finish, unrolled at the Venice Film Festival. Itssubdued reception came as a marked contrast to the anticipatory buzz that ...
-
Reviews
The Forgotten
Dir:Joseph Ruben. US. 2004. 90mins.Itstarts out feeling like a slightly soppy episode of The X-Files, withmotherly love replacing paranoia as the driving emotion. But teasing thriller TheForgotten gets perked up by a handful of judiciously used special effectsand a sense of mystery that could be described as Shyamalan-esque (as in ...
-
Reviews
Bombon El Perro
Dir. CarlosSorin. Arg-Sp. 2004. 96mins.As spare,intimate and intentionally unglamorous as Carlos Sorin's previous film MinimalStories, Bombon, El Perro is likely to follow a similar fate: rakingin a bagful of festival awards, collecting plenty of favourable reviews andgenerating better than average business on the arthouse circuit.The film won theFIPRESCI award at ...
-
Reviews
Kung Fu Hustle (Gungfu)
Dir: Stephen Chow. HK-Chi. 2004. 95minsThe martial arts film to end all martial arts films, Kung FuHustle makes Kill Bill look like a playground scuffle. StephenChow's affectionate salute to the era of Bruce Lee and the Shaw Brothers is ajaw-dropping mixture of blistering fight sequences, slapstick sadism anddelirious black comedy.Action ...
-
Reviews
Vital
Dir/scr/cine/prod des/ed:Shinya Tsukamoto. Japan. 2004. 86mins.Tsukamoto is one of those directors whose name on the opening credits is alwaysgreeted with applause by festival junkies. A one-man band who hates to delegateany of the headline technical jobs, Tsukamoto will probably never break out ofthe cult ghetto, unlike his Japanese compatriots, Takeshi ...
-
Reviews
Imaginary Heroes
Dir/scr: DanHarris. US. 2004. 112minsThe great soap opera of life is revisited once again in Imaginary Heroes,an entertaining but superficial tug at the heartstrings. The directorial debutof X-Men 2 screenwriter Dan Harris picks at the scabs of a family'semotional wounds to reveal a considerable collection of guilty secrets anddamaging deceptions.Superioracting ...
-
Reviews
The Intruder
Dir: Claire Denis. Fr.2004. 130mins."Impenetrable" would be a generous way of describing French auteur ClaireDenis' latest feature; adjectives like "self-indulgent" and "dull" might occurto the less well-disposed critic.Not that this film is devoidof moments of visual poetry and - at least in the early stages - plot tension.But its wilful ...
-
Reviews
Eros
Dir/scr: Wong Kar Wai,Steven Soderbergh Michelangelo Antonioni (screenplay with Tonino Guerra).Fr-It-Lux. 2004. 108 mins."I wanted my name on aposter with Michelangelo Antonioni," is Steven Soderbergh's stated reason forcoming on board the three-part portmanteau film Eros. Having seen thefilm, one wonders if Soderbergh will now be asking distributors to take hisname ...
-
Reviews
Undertow
Dir. David Gordon Green. US. 2004. 107mins.An intoxicating auteur spin on Southern Gothic, Undertow is a conventional adventurestory - good boys, bad uncle, hidden gold - that is told in a mostunconventional way. To say its his most commercial film yet isn't saying much,as the qualities that make it a ...