Latest reviews – Page 495
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Reviews
Une Hirondelle A Fait Le Printemps
Dir: Christian Carion. France. 103mins.While many French films deal with provincials who seek love and fortune in the big city (ie Paris), first-time director Christian Carion's Une Hirondelle A Fait Le Printemps takes the reverse tack: a young city-slicker who abandons a successful career to live off the land. ...
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Reviews
Thirteen Ghosts
Dir: Steve Beck. US. 2001. 90 mins. The ghouls are the title characters but the elaborate set is the real star of Thirteen Ghosts, a one-note, yet efficiently jolting Halloween offering from Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis' mid-budget horror label Dark Castle Entertainment. Re-made (like Dark Castle's Halloween '99 release ...
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Reviews
On The Line
Dir: Eric Bross. US 2001. 85 minutes A Serendipity for the junior high school crowd, On the Line stars two of today's biggest teeny-bopper heart-throbs, 'N Sync bandmates Lance Bass and Joey Fatone. As with the recent John Cusack-Kate Beckinsale romantic comedy, On The Line puts a slight spin on ...
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Reviews
Bones
Dir: Ernest Dickerson. US. 2001. 90 mins. Its touches of social conscience aside, Bones is the sort of horror nonsense that only really thrill-starved pre-Halloween filmgoers can be expected to swallow. Featuring rapper Snoop Dogg in his first starring role and boosted by a soundtrack that has already entered the ...
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Reviews
K-PAX
Dir Iain Softley. US 2001. 118minsLawrence Gordon, the producer of K-Pax, would like to believe that his new film is in the spiritual-magical vein of Field Of Dreams (1989), a far superior baseball story about faith and redemption, which he also produced. However, judging by the minor melodrama that unfolds ...
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Reviews
The Man Who Sued God
Dir: Mark Joffe. Australia. 2001. 102 mins.Although this intelligent comedy could well have bitten deeper and challenged its heavyweight targets (God, religion, insurance) more aggressively, it's nevertheless a pleasure to welcome a widescreen entertainment so confident in its adult, humanistic stance. With an intriguing premise and a star role exactly ...
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Reviews
Chaos
Dir: Coline Serreau. France. 110mins.If there's one occupational hazard that seems to afflict comic artists at some point in their careers, it's the desire to be taken seriously and the temptation to dispense with laughter as a medium. This is what has now happened to writer-director Coline Serreau, who has ...
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Reviews
Dinner Rush
Dir Bob Giraldi. US 2001. 94 mins.There is a lot of fun to be had in Bob Giraldi's Dinner Rush, an unpretentious, quintessentially New York independent film that recalls the kind of offbeat, low-budget pictures made in the 1970s and early 1980s, before independent cinema became a forceful movement or ...
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Reviews
My Voyage To Italy (Il Mio Viaggio In Italia)
Dir Martin Scorsese. Italy-US 1999. 246 min.No history book about Italian cinema (and there have been several quite good ones) can accomplish what Martin Scorsese does in this four-hour documentary. For My Voyage To Italy brings the extraordinarily rich tradition of this national cinema to life by placing it in ...
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Reviews
Musa: The Warrior
Dir: Kim Sung-Su. South Korea 2001 154 MinsThis South Korean blockbuster had its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival at the same time as the September 11 attacks sent journalists and buyers racing from screening rooms to watch real-life horror unfold on TV sets. Those who missed the film ...
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Reviews
Breve Traversee (Brief Crossing)
Dir: Catherine Breillat. France. 2001. 82 mins. While too slight, both dramatically and visually, to be entirely persuasive as a cinema feature, Catherine Breillat's contribution to a 10-part series commissioned by French broadcaster Arte "on the theme of difference and equality between the sexes" is an incisive and elegant chamber ...
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Reviews
The Last Castle
Dir Rod Lurie. US 2001. 130 mins.The big mystery of prison action film The Last Castle is not how Robert Redford was cast in the lead - he received $11 million, his highest pay cheque to date - but how director Rod Lurie got such low-key and unimpressive performances ...
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Reviews
Truly Human (Et Rigtig Menneske)
Dir: Aake Sandgren. Denmark. 2001. 93 mins. This sixth production from the Dogme 95 stable is a bittersweet fantasy variant on the "noble savage" genre that has exercised art-house films such as Francois Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage or Werner Herzog's The Enigma Of Kasper Hauser, as well as more mainstream fare ...
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Reviews
Bunuel And King Solomon's Table
Dir: Carlos Saura. Spain-Germany-Mexico. 105 mins.Bunuel And King Solomon's Table (Bunuel Y La Mesa Del Rey Salomon) closed September's San Sebastian International Film Festival with a resounding thud. One influential local critic called it "probably the worst Saura has made," proving that the combination of a respected veteran filmmaker (Carmen, ...
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Reviews
Sur Mes Levres (Read My Lips)
Dir: Jacques Audiard. France. 2001. 115minsAn adventurous mixture of unconventional romance and crime melodrama, Sur Mes Levres underlines writer-director Jacques Audiard's reputation for originality and flair. Initially quite unpredictable, the film, which is released in France this week, remains intriguing even as it becomes increasingly bogged down in the elaborate ...
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Reviews
Riding In Cars With Boys
Dir Penny Marshall. US 2001. 132 min.What begins as fun, nostalgic highschool comedy quickly escalates into a relentlessly dreary melodrama in Penny Marshall's Riding in Cars With Boys, a two-decade chronicle of a woman who got pregnant at adolescence and found herself stuck with an undesirable marriage and ...
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Reviews
Invincible
Dir: Werner Herzog. UK/Germany. 2001. 130mins.After many years dedicated to stage, documentaries and guest performances in films directed by others, Werner Herzog, one of the original pillars of New German cinema, makes a return to feature-length fiction. However, as with his previous films (such as The Enigma Of Kaspar Hauser ...
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Reviews
Corky Romano
Dir: Rob Pritts. US 2001. 104 minutes Children are taught never to call anyone or anything "stupid," a word which all parents for some reason find objectionable. With that in mind, let it be said that the film Corky Romano has one of the lowest IQs in recent memory --probably ...
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Reviews
POV: Point Of View
Dir: Tomas Gislason. Denmark. 2001. 110 mins. One of the most striking and unusual films in San Sebastian's Zabaltegi New Directors section, POV: Point Of View is a visually brilliant, thematically skimpy homage to the classic American road movie that will provoke love-or-loathe reactions. Its most likely appeal is to ...