Latest reviews – Page 488
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Reviews
KT
Dir: Junji Sakamoto. Jap. 2001. 138mins.A thriller about the true-life 1973 kidnapping of Kim Dae-jung, the current South Korean president, from a Tokyo hotel, KT tries for a no-frills approach that presents its knotty Cold War story in realistic shades of grey, as if John Le Carre was transposed to ...
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Reviews
Dandy (La Bande Du Drugstore)
Dir: Francois Armanet. France. 2001. 98 mins.Dandy suffers from some of the same superficiality as the posturing, blow-dried youths it portrays. It's difficult to see this film, about Parisian rich kids during the mid to late 1960s, appealing to their modern-day peers in the 16 to 20-year-old age group, who ...
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Reviews
Take Care Of My Cat
Dir: Jeong Jae-eun. Korea. 2001. 112 mins.Take Care Of My Cat is a sympathetic, modern coming-of-age movie. As such it is a Korean antidote to the make-believe and squeaky-clean Hollywood approach adopted by Britney Spears-vehicle Crossroads, which examines a similar demographic. Structured as a slightly unbalanced five-hander with a tone ...
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Reviews
God's Bankers (I Banchieri Di Dio)
Dir: Giuseppe Ferrara. Italy. 2002. 127mins.With its controversial reconstruction of the life and mysterious death of Italian banker Roberto Calvi, Giuseppa Ferrara's latest film was designed to create an even bigger stir than his earlier political outings. God's Bankers has done so on one level at least: at the end ...
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Reviews
The Best Day Of My Life (Il Piu Bel Giorno Della Mia Vita)
Dir: Cristina Comencini. Italy-UK 2002. 102 mins.Like all of Cristina Comencini's films, The Best Day Of My Life is about relationships: family relationships, sexual relationships and the troubled relationship between the two. A large ensemble piece, it features some of the strongest acting talents on the Italian scene, from veteran ...
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Reviews
Big Trouble
Dir: Barry Sonnenfeld. US. 2002. 84 mins. Delayed from last September because of its stolen bomb and plane hijacking plot points, Barry Sonnenfeld's Big Trouble arrives belatedly on US screens as a lightweight but pleasantly zany farce with a never-ending supply of gags and a more than capable ensemble cast ...
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Reviews
Food Of Love
Dir: Ventura Pons. Sp-Ger. 2002. 112mins.An absorbing tale of obsessive love, featuring nice visual exploitation by Catalan director Ventura Pons of his native Barcelona, make Food Of Love enjoyable to watch. Some audiences may be put off by Pons' theatrical style, and occasionally find some of the dialogue and ...
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Reviews
Dog Soldiers
Dir: Neil Marshall. UK. 2001. 105minsA zestful, unpretentious slab of prime British horror movie, Dog Soldiers delivers enough guts and gore to please most genre fans. Cheerfully acknowledging its limitations and influences without toppling into post-modern parody, it also has the chance of reaching a wider general audience. The mixture ...
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Reviews
Death To Smoochy
Dir: Danny DeVito. US. 2002. 109 mins. A dark, subversive comedy enthusiastically realised by some big-name Hollywood talents - most notably Robin Williams, for whom it is the first of three big-screen comeback projects - Death To Smoochy takes an amusing premise and flogs it well beyond the point of ...
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Reviews
Monsieur Batignole
Dir: Gerard Jugnot. 2002. France. 100mins.Only months after the commercial failure of Laissez Passer, Bertrand Tavernier's ambitious saga about the French film industry under the German Occupation, comes this blandly conventional feelgood comedy-drama. Gerard Jugnot's tale about an ordinary Parisian's moral resistance to wartime anti-Semitism is currently doing brisk business ...
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Reviews
Panic Room
Dir: David Fincher. US. 2002. 113minsDavid Fincher is such a technically inventive and brilliant director that, even when he tackles a genre film, like his new suspense feature The Panic Room, he elevates it with his signature flourishes way above its damsel-in-distress origins. Recalling noir films about women trapped in ...
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Reviews
Sorority Boys
Dir: Wally Wolodarsky. US. 2002. 93 mins.Combining elements of Animal House and Tootsie - considerably more of the former than the latter - Sorority Boys is a college comedy that optimistically attempts to blend social commentary with bawdy campus humour. Predictably enough, it fails to fully deliver in either department. ...
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Reviews
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial: The 20th Anniversay
Dir Steven Spielberg. US. 1982. 120mins.Despite some new footage and astute digital enhancements, the 20th anniversary reissue of E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Steven Spielberg's most beloved alien fable, shows that the film is very much a product of its times, reflecting the zeitgeist and technology of 1982. That ...
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Reviews
Blade II
Dir Guillermo Del Toro. US. 2002. 117mins.Gruesome and ghastly violence, state-of-the-art special effects, fast-moving action and stylish cutting and framing can't conceal the fact that there's a big blank space at the centre of Blade II. Largely this is the fault of David Goyer's slender, meandering, and uninvolving scripting ...
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Reviews
From Nought To Ten (Dazeroadiec)
Dir: Luciano Ligabue. Italy, 2002. 100mins.Italian rockstar Luciano Ligabue rather showed up the country's army of under- achieving full-time directors when his first film, Radiofreccia, turned out to be both a critical and a commercial success. But hubris - at least on the critical front - has not been long ...
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Reviews
The Tracker
Dir: Rolf de Heer. Australia. 2002. 98minsThe flood of Australian features with Aboriginal themes financed, coincidentally, two years ago are now finding their way to cinema screens. Philip Noyce's eagerly awaited Rabbit-Proof Fence has chosen to expose Australia's dirty laundry with its portrait of a 1930s government attempting to assimilate ...
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Reviews
Ali G IndaHouse
Dir: Mark Mylod. UK. 2002. 88 mins. A send-up of white kids trying to act black, Sacha Baron Cohen's alter ego Ali G has cut quite a figure on UK TV, making a fool of celebrities like David Beckham. He has shot a video with Madonna (Music). Now he has ...
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Reviews
Asterix & Obelix: Mission Cleopatra
Dir: Alain Chabat. France. 2001. 107mins.Mission Cleopatra has come, been seen and conquered. In a mere six weeks, the record-setting $42m blockbuster comedy has racked up 12.9m admissions ($61.9m) in France from 898 sites, and should replace 1992 Gaumont time-warp comedy Les Visiteurs as the second top-grossing French film of ...
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Reviews
Stolen Summer
Dir Pete Jones. US 2002. 95 mins.The background story of how Stolen Summer was produced has been documented with step-by-step accuracy, healthy humour and a good deal of cynicism and self-importance in HBO's hit US TV series, Project Greenlight. Unfortunately, this high media profile overshadows and overwhelms the artistic merits ...
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Reviews
Bend It Like Beckham
Dir: Gurinder Chadha. UK. 2001. 110mins.Gurinder Chadha's high-spirited, unassuming comedy about a football-mad Indian girl living in London is a real charmer which should score with teenagers but also has strong crossover potential. In the UK it will coast on the successful new wave of popular Asian comedy of which ...