Latest reviews – Page 487
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Reviews
The City Of No Limits (En La Ciudad Sin Limites)
Dir: Antonio Hernandez. Sp-Arg. 2001. 118minsAntonio Hernandez's ensemble feature is a dramatic gem, a beautifully scripted and acted film with a glossy look and universal tale that has the capacity to move audiences anywhere. It represents a marketing challenge to distributors due to its complex storyline and straddling of genres, ...
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Reviews
Smoking Room
Dirs: Julio Wallovits, Roger Gual. Spain. 2002. 89mins.This low-budget debut feature film seemingly came out of nowhere to quietly storm last week's Spanish Film Festival in Malaga, where it created buzz among critics, crowds and even international buyers gathered for a sidebar market. The film marks the debut of ...
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Reviews
Thunderpants
Dir: Peter Hewitt. UK-Germany. 2002. 84mins. The big selling point of Thunderpants for its target audience will also be the main deterrent for their chaperones: the idea of a nondescript, none-too-bright 10-year-old boy with a single extraordinary talent for farting. Our hero's peer group will, of course, love this premise. ...
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Reviews
Femme Fatale
Dir: Brian De Palma. Fr-US 2002. 110mins. With its chances and coincidences, doubles, dream sequences and alternative endings, Femme Fatale is an enigmatic European art-movie lightly disguised as a Hollywood genre thriller. There is certainly enough eye-popping sex and spectacle to steer it to decent box-office returns. In France ...
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Reviews
Australian Rules
Dir: Paul Goldman. Australia. 2002. 98mins.The Australian success of Phillip Noyce's Rabbit-Proof Fence has opened distribution doors previously locked to depictions of Aboriginal issues and racial conflict. In its wake comes Australian Rules, a biting reminder of the distance that still exists between white and indigenous communities in modern Australia. ...
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Reviews
The Repentant (La Repentie)
Dir: Laetitia Masson. France. 2002. 125minsLife is a lie. History is what you make it out to be. And so is this film. Seemingly created for and by Isabelle Adjani, La Repentie is either a triumphant return to the cinema for the enigmatic French screen goddess, after three years of ...
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Reviews
Deuces Wild
Dir: Scott Kalvert. US. 2002. 97minsDeuces Wild is a throwback. Not just because it is set in the world of gang wars in 1950s Brooklyn, but because it so happily recalls those dated rumble movies of the early 1980s like The Outsiders and Rumble Fish. Matt Dillon even shows up, ...
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Reviews
Jason X
Dir: Jim Isaac. US. 2002. 93mins.Putting hockey-masked slasher icon Jason into space sounds a desperate idea for reviving the Friday The 13th horror franchise. But while this 10th instalment in the 22-year-old series relies on the same crude, high-body-count schlock appeal as its predecessors, it still manages to have some ...
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Reviews
Hollywood Ending
Dir: Woody Allen. US.2002. 112 mins.Woody Allen's HollywoodEnding follows more in thevein of his recent run of pleasurable but throwaway comedies than it does thefar more emotionally affecting Purple Rose Of Cairo, his other film to deal specifically with cinema itself. With an emphasis on visual humour, both literal and ...
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Reviews
Spider-Man (Spider-Man)
Dir: Sam Raimi. US. 2002. 121mins.Even in the face of new Star Wars, Harry Potter and Lord Of The Rings movies, no film this year can have the want-to-see already generated by Columbia Pictures' Spider-Man, a lavish $150m live-action movie of the beloved comic strip, which has been in gestation ...
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Reviews
A Snake Of June (Rokugatsu No Hebi)
Dir: Shinya Tsukamoto. Japan. 2002. 80 mins.Having burst onto the international indie scene in 1989 with Tetsuo: The Iron Man, Shinya Tsukamoto has always been a one-main show, writing, filming, editing and acting his private visions of a nightmare world in which humans have fused to machines, all set to ...
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Reviews
Life Or Something Like It
Dir: Stephen Herek. US. 2002. 103 mins. "Live every day as if it was your last" is the none-too-original moral of Life Or Something Like It, an insipid romantic-comedy/drama that casts Angelina Jolie as a post-feminist Marilyn Monroe who discovers the drawbacks of blonde ambition and the virtues of true ...
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Reviews
Biggie & Tupac
Dir: Nick Broomfield. UK. 2001. 107mins. The ostensible subject of Nick Broomfield's first feature since Kurt & Courtney, his controversial 1998 film about the suicide of Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, is the unresolved murders of rap stars Tupac Shakur and Biggie Smalls. Its actual subject is much the same as ...
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Reviews
Casomai
Dir: Alessandro D'Alatri. Italy. 2002. 116mins.Alessandro D'Alatri is back with a stylish romantic comedy which draws more than any of his previous outings on his other job - directing TV commercials. Set in contemporary Milan, Casomai will appeal to the generation it depicts: urban professional thirtysomethings, caught between work, the ...
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Reviews
Murder By Numbers
Dir: Barbet Schroeder. US. 2002. 120mins.Murder By Numbers is an ambitious attempt to make a multi-layered murder investigation film, loosely retelling the chilling Leopold and Loeb case which has intrigued everyone from Alfred Hitchcock in Rope to Tom Kalin in Swoon. And with Barbet Schroeder behind the camera, the film ...
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Reviews
The Scorpion King
Dir: Chuck Russell. US. 2002. 92mins.The Mummy franchise lives on in this rumbustious, two-fisted prequel that serves up breathless, B-movie action with A-level production values. Promoted to centre stage, Dwayne Johnson, aka wrestler The Rock, lays down a persuasive marker as a 21st-century action hero and the heady mixture of ...
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Reviews
The Warrior
Dir: Asif Kapadia. UK/India. 2001. 86minsA poised and confident first feature, The Warrior is an ambitious mixture of morality tale and sweeping adventure set against the spectacular scenery and burning light of Rajasthan and the Himalayas. The absorbing story of one man's renunciation of violence and his quest for peace ...
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Reviews
The Hour Of Religion (L'Ora di Religione)
Dir: Marco Bellocchio. Italy. 2002. 103mins.The term "auteur" is not much used these days outside of ironic quotation marks. But it is difficult to think of a better description for Italian director Marco Bellocchio, now well into his fourth creative decade. The story of an atheist painter who suddenly discovers ...
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Reviews
Changing Lanes
Dir: Roger Michell. US. 2002. 98 mins. Part psychological thriller, part urban morality play, Changing Lanes is that rare Hollywood offering that works both as genre entertainment and as something more complex and thought-provoking. Deftly directed - in a significant change of mood from his 1999 romantic-comedy Notting Hill - ...
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Reviews
The Shanghai Spell (El Embrujo De Shanghai)
Dir: Fernando Trueba. Spain. 2002. 122mins.Lush, even exotic, set designs and costumes are the biggest draws for The Shanghai Spell (El Embrujo De Shanghai), Oscar-award winning director Fernando Trueba's (Belle Epoque) 1940s drama. Trueba's reputation, and strong international interest in his recent hits such as jazz documentary 54th Street (Calle ...