Latest reviews – Page 493
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Reviews
The Good Girl
Dir: Miguel Arteta. US 2001. 93mins.The Good Girl, Miguel Arteta's third feature, represents a step in the right direction for him as a filmmaker, as well as for his star, Jennifer Aniston, best known so far for her part in the TV series Friends. Centring on a thirtysomething woman ...
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Reviews
Hysterical Blindness
Dir: Mira Nair. US. 2002. 98mins Despite securing the prized "centrepiece" premiere slot at this year's Sundance, Mira Nair's immediate follow-up to her Venice-winning Monsoon Wedding succumbs to some of the perils involved in adapting stage plays to the big screen - should this made-for-cable film, about the struggles of ...
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Reviews
Tadpole
Dir: Gary Winick. US. 2002. 78minsA comic delight that features one of the painfully funniest restaurant scenes in recent memory, Gary Winick's Tadpole became an audience favourite the moment it screened in Sundance this year and an immediate target for studio distributors who saw the potential for a theatrical breakout ...
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Reviews
Gerry
Dir: Gus Van Sant. US-UK. 2001. 103mins.After reaching the nadir of his career with the pointless remake of Psycho, followed by mainstream Hollywood fare Finding Forrester, an old-fashioned star vehicle for Sean Connery, Gus Van Sant goes back to his independent roots with Gerry, a visually compelling road movie that ...
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Reviews
Impostor
Dir: Gary Fleder. US. 2001. 95 mins. With a McCarthy-era literary pedigree and thinking man's hunk Gary Sinese producing as well as starring, it's no surprise that Impostor is a sci-fi thriller more concerned with the genre's intellectual than visceral possibilities. Yet while the story offers some interesting topical parallels ...
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Reviews
Burning In The Wind (Brucio Nel Vento)
Dir: Silvio Soldini. It-Switz. 2001. 118 mins.An Italian director makes a film set in Switzerland with mainly Czech actors and dialogue, based on a novel by a Hungarian refugee who writes in French. Sounds like a recipe for an indigestible Europudding. In reality, however, Brucio Nel Vento is Silvio ...
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Reviews
Tricky Life (En La Puta Vida)
Dir: Beatriz Flores Silva. Belg-Uru-Sp-Cuba. 97mins.This ambitious Uruguayan tragi-comedy took its home box office by storm last year, as well as gleaning the top prize at Spain's Iberoamerican Film Festival in November. Uruguay's first-ever nomination to the foreign language Oscar, Tricky Life may also serve to re-ignite the country's ...
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Reviews
The Shipping News
Dir Lasse Hallstrom. US 2001. 111mins.What has happened to the singular vision of Lasse Hallstrom, so clearly evident in his Swedish (My Life As A Dog) and first American film (What's Eating Gilbert Grape')' The Shipping News, his third consecutive film for Miramax, propagates the same compassionate humanism that defined ...
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Reviews
I Am Sam
Dir: Jessie Nelson. US 2001. 134mins.This film about a mentally-challenged father (Penn) whose seven-year old daughter is taken away from him by social workers is as cloying as they come and will try the patience of even the actor's most loyal fans. Certainly there is an audience for this type ...
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Reviews
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
Dir: John A Davis. US. 2001. 92 mins.Viacom has loaded a lot of responsibility onto the computer-animated shoulders of Jimmy Neutron. Intended as the basis for a "multi-platform franchise", the character has been popping up for the past 10 months on Viacom's Nickelodeon channel in preparation for a feature debut ...
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Reviews
Ali
Dir: Michael Mann. US 2001. 159mins.The challenge of how to present dramatically the life of Muhammad Ali, arguably the most recognisable and flamboyant celebrity of the 20th century, is only partially met in Michael Mann's Ali. An ambitious but flawed film, it narrowly focuses on one decade in ...
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Reviews
Kate & Leopold
Dir: James Mangold. US. 2001. 120minsSo here's the pitch: a 19th-century English duke gets caught up in a time warp and is transported from New York in 1876 to 2001 where he meets a high-powered career woman. After much comedy derived from the differences between the two, they fall in ...
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Reviews
Enigma
Screened at Sundance (Premieres). Dir: Michael Apted. UK. 2001. 117mins.Revisiting a little-known yet extremely important and heroic chapter of World War II, Michael Apted's Enigma is a compelling, sumptuously-made romantic thriller that is effective in both its political and more personal dimensions. Steeped in the tense atmosphere of wartime Britain, ...
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Reviews
Charlotte Gray
Dir: Gillian Armstrong. UK-US. 2001. 121minsWith such elegant novel adaptations previously like Little Women and the under-rated Oscar And Lucinda, it is disappointing to see film-maker Gillian Armstrong falter somewhat in her respectable but muddled film of Sebastian Faulks' best-selling novel Charlotte Gray. The story of a Scottish woman ...
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Reviews
2001: The Film Year in Review
There were few great films in 2001, but enough good ones by new (Todd Field), developing (Peter Jackson,Baz Luhrmann), and veteran (Lynch, Altman) directors, to make the year moreagreeable. With most studio releases slipshod and slapdash, the interestingfilms were easily evident on first viewing. Hence, choosing the best was notdifficult, ...
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Reviews
Vanilla Sky
Dir Cameron Crowe. US 2001. 136 mins.Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky provides a classic case study of what happens when a mainstream studio, Paramount, and a major Hollywood star, Tom Cruise, take a terrifically-executed Spanish thriller, Open Your Eyes, and turn it into a spectacularly glossy, big-budget, effects-ridden star vehicle that's ...
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Reviews
Iris
Dir Richard Eyre. UK-US.2001. 90 mins.Viewers expecting to get illuminating insights about the literary genius, eccentric philosophy, and complex sexuality of Iris Murdoch, the British celeb of letters who died in 1999, will be disappointed with Richard Eyre’s Iris, a minor, rambling film, almost made-to-order for the dictates of the ...
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Reviews
Women Talking Dirty
Dir: Coky Giedroyc. UK-US. 1999. 97mins. Although a long time in the works for the talent involved (it is Rocket Pictures' first production to hit the screens since the company was founded five years ago and director Coky Giedroyc's follow-up to her noted 1997 debut, Stella Does Tricks), Women Talking ...
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Reviews
Mean Machine
Dir: Barry Skolnick. UK. 2001. 99 mins. A loose remake and Anglicisation of Robert Aldrich's 1974 prison drama staring Burt Reynolds (released in some territories as The Longest Yard), Mean Machine is aimed at the same audience as Ska Films' most notable hits to date, Guy Ritchie's 1997 Lock, Stock ...