Latest – Page 659
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Reviews
The Final Cut
Dir: Omar Naim. Italy. 2004. 104 mins.The best thing about this sci-fi thriller starring Robin Williams is its premise. The idea that advance in neurotechnology will one day allow us to video our whole lives from somewhere inside our brains throws up all kinds of issues about privacy, about the ...
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Reviews
Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow (To Livadi Pou Dakrisi)
Dir. Theo Angelopoulos. Greece/France/Italy/Germany, 2004. 178mins.This majestic three hour-long epic, possibly the most abstract in Theo Angelopoulos' career, is unlikely to affect his position either in the eyes of ardent admirers, who consider him one of the last modernists in cinema, nor in the opinion of his detractors, who have ...
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Reviews
Les Choristes
Dir: Christophe Barratier. France. 2003. 95 mins.The hottest ticket at the European Film Market in Berlin this year, Les Choristes is the kind of heart-warming, sentimental yarn that some critics might look down on but which crowds are bound to queue around the block for. Fictionally covering the same territory ...
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Reviews
Beautiful Country
Dir: Hans Petter Moland. Norway/US. 2004. 126 mins.A beautifully photographed but dramatically clunky saga about a Vietnamese war child's journey to rejoin his father in America, Beautiful Country is as much Terence Malick's film as it is that of Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland. Malick wrote the treatment, co-produced and ...
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Reviews
The Stratosphere Girl
Dir/scr: M X Oxberg. Ger-UK-Fr-Switz-It. 2004. 92 mins.It's a chilly place, the stratosphere, and the air can get pretty rarefied. Nothing wrong with that, of course: but down here on earth, cinemagoers need a little character warmth and a little story oxygen, and the third feature by young German director ...
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Reviews
Red Lights (Feux Rouges)
Dir: Cedric Kahn. France. 2003. 106 mins.Imagine a bleak and edgy feature-length episode of Mr Bean co-directed by Robert Bresson and Vincent Gallo. Then imagine that it's actually rather good. Dark and unconventional, this road thriller by Roberto Succo director Cedric Kahn gets under the skin in ways that it's ...
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Reviews
Saw
Dir: James Wan. US. 2004. 100mins.Saw is a sub-Se7en B-movie serial killer chiller with more high concepts stuffed into its 100 minutes than it can handle. Riddled with plot holes and with a final twist which aficionados of the genre will spot a mile off, it nevertheless possesses a hankering ...
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Reviews
Before Sunset
Dir: Richard Linklater. USA. 2004. 82 mins.The sequel to Richard Linklater's brief encounter movie Before Sunrise is utterly charming, and has a light but not superficial touch that is all too rare in contemporary boy-meets-girl flicks. Virtually plotless, it is (like many of Linklater's films) a wordy trip which takes ...
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Reviews
Intimate Strangers (Confidences Trop Intimes)
Dir. Patrice Leconte. France, 2003. 104 mins.This brilliantly written, superbly acted, witty two-hander, directed with clockwork precision, finds director Patrice Leconte in top form, doing what he does best - engineering encounters between two opposite characters and watching them squirm. A sentimental thriller, to use his own definition, providing a ...
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Reviews
Country Of My Skull
Dir. John Boorman. UK-Ireland-South Africa. 2003While there is no reason to doubt the profound sincerity and laudable intentions behind this adaptation of Antjie Krog's book, John Boorman's portrait of South Africa grappling with its own terrible past during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) - whose purpose was to clear ...
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Reviews
Daybreak (Om Jag Vander Mig Om)
Dir. Bjorn Runge. Sweden, 2004. 108 mins.Already the recipient of four Swedish Oscars and a hit in its home territory, Bjoern Runge's fourth feature turns out to be yet another one of the recently fashionable multi-episode panoramic spreads that portray contemporary family life in various states of distress. Three separate, ...
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Reviews
First Love (Primo Amore)
Dir: Matteo Garrone. Italy. 2004. 98mins.The only Italian film in competition at Berlin, Matteo Garrone's First Love takes an unflinching look at the subject of anorexia. It is as painful an experience for the audience as it appears to be for the protagonist: by the end, we feel that we ...
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Reviews
The Tulse Luper Suitcases Part II: Vaux To The Sea
Dir: Peter Greenaway Neth-Sp-Lux-Hung-It-Ger-Russ. 2004. 120mins.Part two of the movie arm of Peter Greenaway's gloriously megalomaniac multimedia project The Tulse Luper Suitcases is, if anything, even more ravishingly weird and hermetic than Part I: The Moab Story, which screened at Cannes last year (the second part enjoyed at special screening ...
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Reviews
In Your Hands (Forbrydelser)
Dir Annette K. Olesen. Denmark. 2003. 100 mins.Annette K. Olesen's In Your Hands is the latest Danish film to receive an official Dogme95 certificate, and is the easily the most muscular, in dramatic terms, since the first, Thomas Vinterberg's revelatory family tragedy Festen. In the same big moral vein as ...
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Reviews
Walk On Water
Dir. Eytan Fox. Israel 2004. 93 mins.Back in the opening slot of the Berlin Panorama for a repeat performance after last year's Yossi And Jagger, Israeli director Eytan Fox is no longer content with modest, intimate challenges. His new effort is part spy thriller, part psychological drama, and covers much ...
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Reviews
One Perfect Day
Dir: Paul Currie. Australia. 2003. 105minsTelling their tale of a young 'genius' who rejects composing at London's fusty old Royal Academy of Music in favour of spinning the decks at Melbourne clubs and Outback raves, it was essential that the makers of One Perfect Day got the soundtrack right. This ...
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Reviews
Akame 48 Waterfalls (Akame Shijyuyataki Shinjyumisui)
Dir: Genjiro Arato. Japan. 2003. 159minsA veteran producer of Seijun Suzuki (Zigeunerweisen, Kageroza, Yumeji) and the director of the 1995 The Girl Of The Silence, Genjiro Arato has returned to screen after an absence of eight years with Akame 48 Waterfalls, a film with Suzuki's characteristic mix of traditional Japanese ...
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Reviews
Trauma
Dir: Marc Evans. UK. 2003. 93minsActor Colin Firth goes some way to rescuing his screen persona from being forever enslaved to his romantic alter ego Darcy with his morose presence in Trauma, in which he plays the spooked survivor of a car crash. Dishevelled, disorientated and anything but dashing, Firth's ...
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Reviews
Twin Sisters (De Tweeling)
Dir: Ben Sombogaart. Netherlands. 2002. 135minsProving that Miramax doesn't have a monopoly on well-crafted, Oscar-friendly literary adaptations, Twin Sisters is a sweeping version of the European best-seller by Tessa de Loo. A straightforward account of twin sisters separated by family circumstances and the bitter divisions in wartime Europe, it should ...
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Reviews
En Route (Unterwegs)
Dir: Jan Kruger. Germany 2004. 80mins.A psychological road movie in which an outsider opens up tensions within a holidaying family, Jan Kruger's low-key but absorbing drama won one of the three Tiger Awards at this year's Rotterdam Film Festival. It should bring further plaudits to the young German director, whose ...