Latest – Page 591
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Reviews
Lucky Miles
Dir: Michael James Rowland. Aus. 2007. 105mins. The debut feature from Michael James Rowland, Lucky Miles follows a boatload of asylum seekers cynically dumped on the vast, barely inhabited West Australian coast. Scenically, it's terrific, with gorgeous sunsets and a rich gallery of inhospitable terrains; dramatically, it's less satisfying, for ...
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Reviews
Shotgun Stories
Dir/scr: Jeff Nichols. US. 2007. 93mins. A measured and sobering meditation on violence and discontent, distilled through a blood feud that ruptures two clans of half-brothers, Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories is a highly intelligent and accomplished first feature that makes palpable suffering, loss and the wanton destructiveness of vengeance. Inexplicably ...
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Reviews
Itty Bitty Titty Committee
Dir: Jamie Babbit. US. 2007. 85mins. Naive and over-didactic, but still brimming with infectious energy and a sense of mission that's hard to hate, Jamie Babbit's third feature serves up radical lesbian feminism in teen-movie sauce. Actually, teens are generally more mature than this; Itty Bitty Titty Committee is like ...
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Reviews
Sakuran
Dir: Mika Ninagawa. Jap. 2007. 111mins. Call it lush, sumptuous, a symphony of colours, a cinematographer's cherry blossom dream: Mika Ninagawa's directorial debut Sakuran leaves no doubt about her background. An enormously successful photographer, her first film looks exactly like something she would have concocted in the privacy of her ...
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Reviews
Armin
Dir/scr: Ognjen Svilicic. Cro-Ger-Bos. 2007. 82mins.A low-key Balkan film may seem like a contradiction in terms, given the ebullient energy of the cinema produced in that part of the world, but there is no better way to describe Ognjen Svilicic's second feature. Something of a surprise after his raucous debut ...
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Reviews
Wild Hogs
Dir: Walt Becker. US. 2007. 99mins. Four suburban buddies confront their mid-life crisis by hitting the highway in Wild Hogs, an extremely pedestrian road movie that sputters along in search of laughs. With much of the comedy coming from failed homo-erotic digs at male bonding, this ensemble piece features several ...
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Reviews
The Unpolished (Die Unerzogenen)
Dir: Pia Marais. Ger. 2007. 95mins The perils and occasional benefits of growing up bohemian are subtly and wryly evoked in The Unpolished, a confident debut feature from German director Pia Marais which premiered in Rotterdam, where it was one of the Tiger Award winners. An elliptical, somewhat dreamlike narrative, ...
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Reviews
Zodiac
Dir: David Fincher. US. 2007. 158mins. In the shadows of this year's Oscar ceremony comes the first legitimate contender for next year's honours in the form of David Fincher's Zodiac, a dense but hypnotic and starkly involving account of the unsolved murders in California that spanned the late 1960s and ...
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Reviews
Half Nelson
Ryan Fleck. US. 2006. 107 minsThe tired cliches of the inspirational teacher/pupil relationship are successfully turned on their head in Half Nelson. This is not the kind of formula crowd-pleaser that invites you to applaud the triumph of the underdog, instead it offers a haunting snapshot of the unlikely friendship ...
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Reviews
Saturno Contro
Dir: Ferzan Ozpetek. It-Fr-Turk. 2007. 109mins. The problems of nine little people don't amount to a hill of beans in Italo-Turkish director Ferzan Ozpetek's latest offering, Saturno Contro. Billed as a melancholy generational comedy, this occasionally affecting - but dramatically inert - feature deals with a close-knit circle of thirty- ...
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Reviews
The Filthy World
Dir: Jeff Garlin. US. 2006. 86mins. 'I'm not a sadist, I did it one take,' John Waters says about the notorious climatic action of Pink Flamingos, his breakthrough underground assault of bourgeois refine and social taste whose debauchery ends with Divine, the 300-pound transvestite, ingesting dog faeces. Jean Renoir famously ...
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Reviews
Poseidon
Dir: Wolfgang Petersen. US. 2006. 100mins. Wolfgang Petersen's new version of ocean liner disaster yarn The Poseidon Adventure - first adapted, of course, as a 1972 blockbuster with Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters starring - works well enough as a full-speed-ahead thrill ride, even if it sometimes drifts off into ...
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Reviews
Shelter (Riparo: Anis Fra Di Noi)
Dir: Marco Simon Puccioni. It-Fr. 2007. 105mins. A small, unpolished but involving drama of jealousy and social status, Shelter offers an interesting twist on the theme of the stranger who enters a family unit and exposes its faultlines. The unit in this case is a lesbian couple, and the stranger ...
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Reviews
Lagerfeld Confidential
Dir/scr: Rodolphe Marconi. Fr. 2007. 87mins. Flashy, dazzling if never quite penetrating, Lagerfeld Confidential, French film-maker Rodolphe Marconi's impressionistic documentary of fashion artist, costume designer and photographer Karl Lagerfeld, provides a relatively unvarnished examination of his reptilian charm, talent and considerable genius for promotion. The movie does a reasonable job ...
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Reviews
Madonnas
Dir/scr Maria Speth. 2007. Ger. 100mins. There's nothing beatific or saintly about motherhood in Maria Speth's minimalist new feature, Madonnas. Rita, the mother of five children by at least three fathers, gets out of jail and makes a reluctant effort to live with the kids that she has brought into ...
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Reviews
Alice's House
Dir. Chico Teixeira. Braz. 2007. 90mins. Alice's House , documentarian Chico Teixeira's first fictional feature, is a look inside a middle-class family in Sao Paolo seen largely through the eyes of Alice, a frustrated fortyish manicurist. Teixeira shows us infidelity, love affairs, sibling rivalry and ageing through a cold lens ...
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Reviews
Tekkonkinkreet
Dir: Michael Arias. Jap. 2007. 112mins. The first feature-length Japanese anime to be directed by a foreigner, the impressive Tekkonkinkreet has cult animation written all over it. It's a streetwise Spirited Away, darker, moodier and more adult-oriented than Miyazaki's masterwork, with an apocalyptic undercurrent that reminds one of the dark ...
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Reviews
The Number 23
Dir: Joel Schumacher. US. 2007. 94mins. Jim Carrey continues his beseeching petition of dramatic film fans with The Number 23, a stylish if somewhat murky thriller about one man's downward descent into geometric fixation and madness. The film intriguingly flits around the edges of loopy susceptibility that go hand in ...
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Reviews
Poor Boy's Game
Dir: Clement Virgo. Can. 2007. 104mins. If you haven't had your fill of motivational boxing movies, here's one with a twist. Clement Virgo's Poor Boy's Game is a Canadian fight feature. In Nova Scotia, an ex-con enters the ring to pay a moral debt and escape the dead-end of Halifax's ...