Latest – Page 572
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Reviews
Sunshine Cleaning
Dir: Christine Jeffs. US. 2008. 102minsChristine Jeffs' third feature has a great premise and knockout cast but proves disappointingly soft-centred. Long touted as a follow-up of sorts to Little Miss Sunshine - it shares the same financiers, producers, almost the same title and Oscar-winning actor Alan Arkin in virtually the ...
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Reviews
Be Kind Rewind
Michel Gondry. US.2007. 101minsJean-Luc Godard's famous observation that the best film criticism is to remake the same film is given a deliciously inventive and stylistically daring treatment in virtuoso French director Michel Gondry's fourth feature Be Kind Rewind. It's a jaunty, outrageous and visually inventive fantasia that is wondrous, beguiling ...
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Reviews
Ballast
Dir-scr: Lance Hammer. US. 2008. 96mins.Ballast reminds us that you can find poetry in the unlikeliest and the saddest of places. The grim, grey and impoverished Mississippi Delta in winter is the setting and, to a great extent, the subject of the feature debut of writer-director-editor Lance Hammer. The spare ...
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Reviews
The Yellow Handkerchief
Dir. Udayan Prasad. US. 2008. 103mins. The American debut of Udayan Prasad (My Son the Fanatic), The Yellow Handkerchief is a visually confident, emotionally bruising road movie about a trinity of lost souls haunted by their past and break free of their restricted lives. The writing never quite matches the ...
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Reviews
Good Dick
Dir: Marianna Palka. US. 2008. 85mins. Good Dick opens as an angry young woman rents pornographic films from a local video store, setting the clerk who serves her on a love-struck pursuit. The comedy takes us once again down a familiar Sundance road of neurotic losers in love, complete with ...
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Reviews
Funny Games
Dir: Michael Haneke. US.111minsMichael Haneke's American remake of his 1997 Austrian acclaimed arthouse hit Funny Games, Funny Games US retains the emotional intensity, visceral impact and gripping hold of the original. Thefiercely-intelligent thriller about a family of three held hostage and tortured in their vacation home by two young psychopathsismasterfully-controlled, ...
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Reviews
Cloverfield
Dir: Matt Reeves. US. 2008. 84 mins.An exercise in guerrilla-style genre filmmaking that reframes a classic monster movie conceit as a post-September 11 allegory of big city trepidation, new Internet sensation Cloverfield emerges from the cocoon of its pre-release hype as thrilling piece of terror tailor-made for our times. Skilfully ...
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Reviews
Mad Money
Dir: Callie Khouri. US. 2007. 104 mins.A relentlessly upbeat all-women heist comedy along the lines of How To Beat The High Cost Of Living and Fun With Dick And Jane, Mad Money is inoffensive star-driven entertainment which might capture the imagination of female audiences in theatres, before heading for a ...
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Reviews
Shot In Bombay
Dir: Liz Mermin, UK/US 2007. 99mins.Fact proves racier than fiction in Shot In Bombay, Liz Mermin's documentary on the filming of a Bollywood action movie based on true events. The film in question is Shootout At Lokhandwala, director Apoorva Lakhia's 2007 thriller inspired by a real-life Mumbai gun battle between ...
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Reviews
One Missed Call
Dir: Eric Valette. US. 2008. 87mins.Generic and thematically uninspired, One Missed Call, the US remake of Takashi Miike's 2003 J-horror tale, flounders withitsliteral and ill-advised approach to its supernatural material. This Warner Bros. January castoff will lure fright fans uninterested in the season's award contenders and holiday leftovers, but even ...
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Reviews
27 Dresses
Dir: Anne Fletcher. US, 2008. 111minsWell cast, slickly produced and performed with enough spirit to counterbalance its frequently stupendous lack of originality and plausibility, 27 Dresses pulls all the right levers for (mostly female) diehard romantic comedy audiences looking for just a pinch of wistfulness to go alongsidestray wish-fulfillment scenarios.Having ...
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Reviews
Those Three (An Seh)
Dir/Scr: Naghi Nemati. Iran, 2007. 77mins.Naghi Nemati's assured, poetic debut proves that the Iranian talent factory is still up and running. Playing in Dubai after its Locarno festival bow and Toronto slot, this austerely-shot existential odyssey about three soldiers lost in a snowy wasteland seems tailor-made to illustrate Fellini's claim ...
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Reviews
Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem
Gory but uninspired sci-fi action mixes with dull human drama in Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, a sloppy follow-up to the summer 2004 hit that first pitted Fox's two iconic space monsters against each other on the big screen. While fans of the contemporary Alien vs Predator comic books and videogames ...
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Reviews
Recycle (Ee'adat Khalk)
Dir/Scr: Mahmoud al-Massad. Jordan/Netherlands/USA/Germany 2007. 80mins.Recycle, a portrait of a disillusioned former mujahideen fighter who makes a living collecting scrap cardboard in Zarqa, his Jordanian hometown, is one of those subtle, taciturn, underplayed documentaries that forces its audience to work at teasing out meanings. It's Errol Morris, in other words, ...
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Reviews
Loins of Punjab Presents
Dir: Manish Acharya India/USA 2007. 88mins.A mostly hilarious screwball comedy set around a New York talent contest for expat Indians - or 'desis' - Loins of Punjab Presents has an infectious energy that makes up for the occasional lapse into self-indulgent cliche. With its wacky ensemble cast and its affectionately ...
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Reviews
National Treasure: Book Of Secrets
Dir: Jon Turteltaub. US. 2007. 124mins.The first National Treasure reaped sizable international box-office fortunes with a loopy gee-whiz amalgam of Indiana Jones derring-do and Mission: Impossible-style set pieces. Three years later, the inevitable sequel, dubbed Book Of Secrets, is as derivative of its sources as it is of the first ...
