Latest reviews – Page 492
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Reviews
Beneath Clouds
Dir: Ivan Sen. Australia, 2001. 87 mins.Billed as the first feature film by an indigenous Australian director, Beneath Clouds is a promising debut, although its tight-lipped sense of cool tips over into pretension on more than one occasion. It deals with race relations in modern Australia without stridency and without ...
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Reviews
Kung Pow: Enter The Fist
Dir: Steve Oedekerk. US. 2002. 80 mins. Kung Pow: Enter The Fist is a late-night college joke done on a Hollywood budget. Masterminded by writer-director Steve Oedekerk (whose credits include Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, The Nutty Professor and Patch Adams), the film takes an obscure 1970s Hong Kong karate ...
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Reviews
Pinero
Dir: Leon Ichaso. US. 2001. 99mins With his intense, charismatic performance in Pinero, Benjamin Bratt -best known for his tenure on US TV series Law And Order and a few tepid features - reaches a major turning point in his career. Displaying the kind of acting chops associated with the ...
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Reviews
The Kid Stays In The Picture
Dirs: Brett Morgen & Nanette Burstein. US. 2001. 93 mins.As an irresistible portrait of Hollywood narcissism, this documentary adaptation of Robert Evan's memoirs as a studio mogul is a guilty pleasure of the most complicit kind. Shedding their cinema verite backgrounds, the film-making duo of Brett Morgen and Nanette Burstein ...
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Reviews
Bad Guy (Na Bun-Na Ja)
Dir. Kim Ki-Duk. South Korea. 2001. 101mins.Certainly one of the most provocative filmmakers around, Korea's Kim Ki-Duk seems to be also one of the most prolific. After two consecutive years in Venice (The Isle in 2000 and Address Unknown in 2001) here he is in the Berlinale race, as unsettling, ...
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Reviews
The Mothman Prophesies
Dir: Mark Pellington. US 2001. 119mins.In promoting its cliche-ridden sci-fi-horror-supernatural The Mothman Prophecies, Sony is using the tag line "based on true events", as if the "factuality" of the source material was a badge of honour and necessary condition for taking more seriously a decidedly schlocky and dismissable feature. ...
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Reviews
The Count Of Monte Cristo
Dir: Kevin Reynolds. US. 2002. 131mins. Hollywood's latest take on the ever-popular yarns of Alexandre Dumas is a straightforward but handsomely staged and consistently entertaining version of the author's classic tale of betrayal and revenge in post-Napoleonic France. Rather than attempting to jazz up the material for younger moviegoers (as ...
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Reviews
Personal Velocity
Dir: Rebecca Miller. US. 2001. 85minsThere's a muscular punch to Rebecca Miller's Personal Velocity, the winner of this year's Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic feature at Sundance, that propels her triptych of female portraits way above the soapy women-in-peril melodramas that have become stereotypical of so many trashy TV ...
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Reviews
The Last Kiss (L'Ultimo Bacio)
Dir: Gabriele Muccino. Italy. 2001. 117 mins.Thirty-five-year-old Roman director Gabriele Muccino is the only player on the contemporary Italian scene who has the potential to be as big as Roberto Benigni. His third film, L'Ultimo Bacio (The Last Kiss) was the top grossing Italian film of 2001, grossing Euros 13.1 ...
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Reviews
Alexei's Spring (Alexei To Izumi)
Dir: Sei'ichi Motohashi. Japan. 2001. 104mins.Located deep in a Belarus pine forest , the village of Budische was devastated when radiation from the nearby Chernobyl nuclear power station fell from the skies on April 26, 1986. Most villagers left, but when documentarian Sei'ichi Motohashi arrived in Budische in early 2000, ...
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Reviews
One Night The Moon
Dir: Rachel Perkins. Australia. 2001. 54mins.A showing at the Berlinale continues the remarkable journey of this sub-one-hour, made-for-TV outback musical drama, a collaboration between the lively Sydney-based MusicArtsDance Films (which is now working on Paul Cox's drama-doc Nijinsky), ABCTV's Arts and Entertainment department and OzOpera (the experimental division of Opera ...
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Reviews
Orange County
Dir: Jake Kasdan. US. 2001. 81 mins. Teen comedy Orange County is as sweet and as insubstantial as its title suggests. Relatively subtle by today's gross-out standards, it won't be an easy sell either at home or, especially, abroad. However, the MTV imprimatur and some intriguing credits - star Colin ...
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Reviews
The Son Of The Bride (El Hijo De La Novia)
Dir: Juan Jose Campanella. 2001. Arg-Sp. 123mins.Argentinian director Juan Jose Campanella's The Son Of The Bride (El Hijo De La Novia) is a tender, beautifully acted dramatic comedy that centres on a middle-aged man in crisis. Language may be a hindrance to the film's international aspirations, but the universality ...
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Reviews
Real Women Have Curves
Dir: Patricia Cardoso. US. 2002. 90minsHow ironic that the biggest crowd-pleaser at last week's Sundance Film Festival and winner of its prestigious audience award is made for television. Delighted cinema audiences who cheered and clapped in theatres at Park City will be the only ones in the US to participate ...
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Reviews
The Dancer Upstairs
Dir John Malkovich. US 2001. 134 mins.It's such a rarity nowadays to see an American film about explicitly political themes, and one set in a foreign country, that The Dancer Upstairs, John Malkovich's honourable feature directorial debut, deserves extra credit for its ambitious scope and for being made in the ...
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Reviews
The Laramie Project
Dir Moises Kaufman. US 2001. 94 mins.Although well-intentioned and dealing with the socially relevant issues of hate crimes and gay-bashing, Moises Kaufman's The Laramie Project is a disappointing film from an artistic standpoint. Developed (at the Sundance Institute) and performed all over the US as a theatre ...
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Reviews
Bloody Sunday
Dir: Paul Greengrass. 2002. UK/Ireland. 107 mins The end of this month marks the precise thirtieth anniversary of Bloody Sunday, the name given to that sickening, catalytic chapter in Anglo-Irish history in which 14 unarmed civilians were slaughtered by trigger-happy British paratroopers who had been ostensibly brought in to control ...
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Reviews
Tanguy
Dir: Etienne Chatilliez. France. 2001. 108 mins.With more than 3.6 million admissions after eight weeks - and still going strong - Tanguy confirms director Etienne Chatiliez as one of France's surefire comedy bets, despite an unprolific output (four features in 12 years, beginning with the 1988 smash Life Is A ...
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Reviews
The Children Of God
Dir: Hiroshi Shinomiya. Japan. 2001. 105mins.A documentary about children who scavenge for a living in a Philippine trash dump may sound like depressing fare, but Children Of God director Hiroshi Shinomiya has found strength and dignity in his subjects, as well as human dramas that make for compelling, if occasionally ...
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Reviews
Intact (Intacto)
Dir: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Spain. 108mins.Director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo has crafted an accomplished feature debut with Intact (Intacto), a thriller characterised by slick visuals and an imaginative storyline. The film has done well, although not spectacularly, in its home market, earning $1.17m (pts218.6m) in its first five weeks. International prospects, ...