Latest – Page 549
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Reviews
Igor
Dir: Tony Leondis. US. 2008. 86 mins.Sweet-natured but saddled with strained wisecracking humour and over-busy plotting, children's animated feature Igor never quite manages to shake off a feeling of familiarity that extends from the story's archly hip tone to the misunderstood, lovable main character of a hunchback trying to escape ...
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ReviewsThe Secret Of Moonacre
Dir: Gabor Csupo. UK. 2008. 103mins.Gabor Csupo’schildren’s fantasyabout a plucky and resourceful 13-year-old girl on a magical quest to thwart an encroaching disaster is undermined by a sluggish blend of humour, disengaged characters and a stagnant narrative line. The script - adapted from Elizabeth Goudge’s The ...
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ReviewsA Woman In Berlin (Anonyma - Eine Frau In Berlin)
Director. Max F䲢erb Germany-Poland. 2008. 118 mins.
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ReviewsThe Loss Of A Teardrop Diamond
Dir. Jodie Markell, US, 2008, 102 minutes.In exhuming Tennessee Williams’s unproduced screenplay from 1980, actress-turned-director Jodie Markell has delivered a respectable 1920’s-set upstairs-downstairs story of a vain heiress (Bryce Dallas Howard) who looks beyond her Memphis surroundings but struggles for the respect of a man below ...
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Reviews
Righteous Kill
Dir: Jon Avnet. US. 2008. 100 mins.Screen legends Robert De Niro and Al Pacino team up with director Jon Avnet in Righteous Kill, a thinly-sketched, utterly pedestrian cop thriller that pivots on a very predictable twist ending. An unworthy vehicle for its stars' talents, the movie plays like an episodic ...
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ReviewsPride And Glory
Dir. Gavin O’Connor. US. 2008 125 min.After sitting on the shelf for the better part of two years, Gavin O’Connor’s bruising Manhattan melodrama charges into a congested festival lineup breathing fire and smoke. A coiling police saga about the clash between family and career loyalties, Pride ...
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ReviewsWho Do You Love
Toronto: Breezily-entertaining, this jazz-fuelled biopic may still face a commercial struggle, says Jan Stuart. Dir. Jerry Zaks. US. 2008. 90 minutesA breezily-entertaining dramatisation of the life of blues entrepreneur Leonard Chess (Nivola), Who Do You Lovewill test the public’s appetite for recording studio soap operas. While ...
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Reviews
Lakeview Terrace
Dir: Neil LaBute. US. 2008. 110 mins.Neil LaBute takes his best commercial swing yet with Lakeview Terrace, a solidly-constructed drama of suburban friction and unrest that only fully yields to genre convention in its final, wild, ten minutes. While not enough of a straightforward thriller to attract widescale younger audiences, ...
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ReviewsMid-August Lunch (Pranzo di Ferragosto)
Dir: Gianni Di Gregorio. Italy. 2008. 73mins.Small but utterly charming, Gianni di Gregorio's low-budget feature about an ageing Roman who suddenly finds himself looking after four ancient ladies over the mid-August dog days has enough heart to make up for its paper-thin story, and conceals a ...
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ReviewsFifty Dead Men Walking
Dir. Kari Skogland. UK/Canada. 2008. 118 mins.It was only in the aftermath of the Vietnam War that filmmakers were able to create a substantial body of work reflecting the complexities of what had happened there. The same is proving to be true of the recent ‘Troubles’that ...
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ReviewsWhat Doesn't Kill You
Dir. Brian Goodman, US, 2008, 100 minutesSouth Boston’s Irish gangland fatalism returns to the screen in Brian Goodman’s debut, a buddies-in-crime drama. Two childhood friends in the Southie slums graduate from petty crime to robbery, murder, drugs and prison, and even to a little self-awareness.The challenge ...
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ReviewsA Year Ago In Winter
Dir: Caroline Link. Germany. 2008. 128 mins.Caroline Link’s first film in seven years is an elegantly-woven portrait of a family in crisis after the suicide of an 18 year-old boy and the steps which occur on their way to healing. Never overly gloomy or downbeat, A ...
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ReviewsAfterwards
Dir. Gilles Bourdos, France/Canada/Germany, 2008, 107 minutes.Afterwards requires some serious suspension of disbelief. A man, now a lawyer, who came back from the dead as a boy, meets a doctor with the ability to identify people who are about to die from a white light they ...
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Reviews
Tonight (Nuit de Chien)
Dir: Werner Schroeter. France/Germany/Portugal. 2008. 121 mins.Pascal Greggory - and the audience - stumble through a violent, decadent war-torn Eurocity in veteran German filmmaker Werner Schroeter's Tonight, trying to salvage some sort of meaning from the mess. Though it flares up occasionally with noirish atmosphere and post-apocalpytic ennui, Schroeter's first ...
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Reviews
Giovanna's Father (Il Papa di Giovanna)
Dir/scr: Pupi Avati. Italy, 2008. 104 mins.Easily watchable but eminently forgettable, this period melodrama about a protective father besotted by his deranged daughter is bound to go the way of most previous Pupi Avati films: a respectable career in Italy followed by indifference elsewhere, despite featuring an emotionally-charged performance by ...
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Reviews
The Women
Dir: Diane English. US. 2008. 114 mins.Diane English, the creator of hit 80s TV sitcom Murphy Brown, set herself a tall order for her theatrical directing debut - remaking George Cukor's classic 1939 ensemble starring Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford and Rosalind Russell. So long in the making that it feels ...