Latest – Page 594
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Reviews
Hannibal Rising
Dir: Peter Webber. US. 2007. 121mins. Call it audacious, foolhardy or both, but Hannibal Rising, the prequel about Hannibal Lecter's origins dispenses with the stylish suspense of Silence Of The Lambs and Red Dragon/Manhunter and the campiness of Hannibal to portray the cannibalistic serial killer as an avenging angel of ...
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Reviews
Finishing the Game
Dir: Justin Lin. US. 2007. 93mins. Following his foray directing the studio assignments Annapolis and The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Justin Lin exhibits a warmer, more personal touch with Finishing the Game, a clever though very thin divertissement about filmmaking, Asian cultural stereotypes and the iconic representation of ...
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Reviews
King of California
Dir/scr: Mike Cahill. US. 2007. 93mins. A bittersweet comic fable, Mike Cahill's debut feature King of California navigates a quixotic emotional register perched between fantasy and delusion that imagines a sweetly anarchic world where adolescent desire for normality and adult hope for grandeur clash by night. It features a lovely, ...
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Reviews
On The Road With Judas
Dir/scr: JJ Lask. 100mins. US. 2006. In On the Road with Judas, novelist and television-commercial editor JJ Lask shows aptitude for making sense of a complex, multi-character narrative that in less sure hands would be chaotic and incoherent. However his achievement is more technical than emotional as beneath the Charlie ...
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Reviews
The Messengers
Dirs: Oxide and Danny Pang. US. 2007. 91mins. The studio debut of the gifted horror specialists Oxide and Danny Pang (The Eye , Bangkok Dangerous), The Messengers is a visually assured though dramatically flat ghost story about an endangered American family unaware their just purchased North Dakota farmhouse harbors a ...
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Reviews
Because I Said So
Dir: Michael Lehmann US. 2007. 100mins. Diane Keaton leads a multi-generational female ensemble in Because I Said So, a mostly frothy and predictable romantic comedy that occasionally gets serious on subjects including mother-daughter relationships and even female sexuality. The cast and viewpoint could be enough to pull in a fairly ...
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Reviews
The Signal (La Senal)
Dirs/Writers: David Bruckner, Jacob Gentry, Dan Bush. 99 minutes. U.S. 2006.A low-budget horror picture filmed in high-definition video to look ultra-realistic, The Signal has mind-numbingly brutal gore and violence that could catch on with extremist horror buffs because of its unusual structure and fast-moving nature. The picture appeared at Sundance ...
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Reviews
The Ten
Dir: David Wain. USDavid Wain's The Ten, a mildly heretical iteration of Mel Brooks or Monty Python style satire, strains very hard to find shock value though it is less renegade than nasty and somewhat repugnant. Aside from two standout contributions, this scattershot effort to illustrate, in a comic vernacular, ...
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Reviews
Chapter 27
Dir/Writer: Jarrett Schaefer. 100 minutes. US.Pointless and confusingly acted by a purposely hefty Jared Leto, this self-indulgent portrait of an insane Mark David Chapman in the three days before he assassinated John Lennon lacks insight or drama. Lindsay Lohan's supporting role as an excitable Lennon fan who befriends Chapman is ...
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Reviews
Joshua
Dir: George Ratliff. 105 minutes. U.S. A tense, stylish and satisfyingly adult psychological thriller about the bad side of having children, George Ratliff's Joshua benefits from fine writing and acting - especially by Vera Farmiga - but is marred by a final act that lacks a revelatory climax worthy of ...
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Reviews
Black Snake Moan
Craig Brewer: US: 2007Craig Brewer's third feature Black Snake Moan is about the redemption of sleaze, though it plays closer to a shotgun marriage of Baby Doll and Boxing Helena. Even more than Hustle & Flow, Brewer's new work is designed as a deliberate provocation that mixes like a Molotov ...
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Reviews
Teeth
Dir/Writer: Mitchell Lichtenstein. 87 minutes. USWriter/director Mitchell Lichtenstein's, Teeth could have been just another bloody gross-out horror comedy with a gimmick - a teen virgin discovers she has a toothed vagina. But the sexuality angle, as well as the luminous presence and naturalistic performance of Jess Weixler as that girl, ...
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Reviews
Under The Same Moon (La Misma Luna)
Dir: Patricia Riggen. US. 2007. 109 mins.Patricia Riggen's first feature film La Misma Luna (The Same Moon) is a road movie which starts off as one of those earnest movies which 'wears its heart on its sleeve' and ultimately, irretrievably, descends into cliche and sentimentality. Centred around a Mexican boy ...
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Reviews
Summer Rain (El Camino De Los Ingleses)
Dir: Antonio Banderas. Spain. 2007. 118 mins.A dreamlike and seductive second feature from Antonio Banderas, Summer Rain follows a group of young men and women in Malaga in the 1970s as they struggle to transition into adulthood. A nostalgic exercise of sorts for Banderas, himself born and raised in Malaga, ...
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Reviews
Crazy Love
Dir: Dan Klores, US, 2007, 91 minutes, color, SONY HD-cam. Love is blind, or so it turned out in the romance of ambulance-chasing lawyer Burton Pugach, who hired thugs to throw a caustic chemical into the face of his girlfriend Linda Riss when she refused to marry him ...
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Reviews
Interview
Dir: Steve Buscemi. US. 2007. 86 mins.Interview, Steve Buscemi's American adaptation of the 2003 Theo van Gogh film of the same name, offers a polished but tamer version of the original, coming at its subject without van Gogh's rough raunchy edges. Yet the performances, especially Sienna Miller's, are an asset ...
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Reviews
Clubland
Directed by Cherie Nowlan. Australia. 2007. 108 mins.Clubland, Cherie Nowlan's first film since Thank God He Met Lizzie in 1997 is a rambling but likeable movie which continues the Ozzie tradition of blending offbeat comedy and high melodrama, a campy feelgood cocktail familiar from Muriel's Wedding, Strictly Ballroom, The Adventures ...
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Reviews
The Pool
Dir: Chris Smith. US. 2007. 106mins.In his second narrative feature The Pool, documentary film-maker Chris Smith (American Movie) considerably expands his range and thematic concerns. Working in Hindi, telling a low key, resonant story about an 18-year-old Indian boy's quest to break free of his disadvantaged origins, Smith is working ...
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Reviews
The Mark of Cain
Dir: Marc Munden. UK. 2007. 90mins Moral dilemmas both public and personal form the core of The Mark of Cain, a gripping and very timely drama about British forces in Iraq. Written by playwright and TV screenwriter Tony Marchant (Kid in the Corner, Holding On), a specialist in bringing political ...
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Reviews
Snow Angels
Dir. David Gordon Green. US. 2007. 106mins. Snow Angels takes director David Gordon Green out of the American South, and it takes his film-making away from atmospheric meditation and into dense storytelling. His wintry small-town tale, adapted by Green from Stewart O'Nan's 1994 novel, examines a warm teenage relationship that ...