Latest – Page 709
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Reviews
Pulse
Dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa. Japan. 118 minsKiyoushi Kurosawa's follow up to films like Cure and Charisma is his most commercial film and one that makes the current spate of teen-targeted shockers from Japan seem about as scary as the latest urban legend told around the school-lunch table. Watching Pulse is like ...
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Reviews
Hijack Stories
Dir: Oliver Schmitz. South Africa. 2001. 94 mins A compelling focus on black identity in the new South Africa, Hijack Stories marks a welcome return to feature films from director Oliver Schmitz 14 years after his award-winning debut Mapantsula. The generally polished handling of topical, thought-provoking material means that it ...
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Reviews
Lantana
Dir: Ray Lawrence. Australia. 2001. 120 mins.Opening the 48th Sydney Film Festival, the world premiere of Lantana was received by a packed and celebrity-strewn audience with pin-drop intensity and warm regard. Ray Lawrence is an outstanding commercials director but this is his first feature since the highly regarded Bliss, the ...
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Reviews
Lara Croft: Tomb Raider
Directed by Simon West. US 2001. 120 mins.Displaying boobs, brawn, and brain (in this order), Angelina Jolie renders such a splashy performance in Lara Croft: Tomb Raider that she not only elevates the video-game turned big-screen adventure a notch or two above its routine storyline, but also makes the entire ...
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Reviews
Il Mestiere Delle Armi (The Profession of Arms)
Dir: Ermanno Olmi. Italy/France/Germany, 2001. 104 mins.Veteran Italian auteur Ermanno Olmi has come up with a hermetically-sealed historical epic that some will find ravishingly poetic, others merely boring. Not a few viewers will shuttle between these two states: something of an Italian Tarkowsky, Olmi has the rare talent of transfixing ...
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Reviews
Swordfish
Directed by Dominic Sena. US 2001. 100 mins.After a couple of major flops (Battleship Earth, Lucky Numbers), John Travolta is again in top form as the morally ambiguous protagonist of the techno thriller, Swordfish, playing a dangerously charismatic spy who propagates his own brand of patriotism. Boasting a sleek look ...
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Reviews
Pau And His Brother
Dir: Marc Recha. Spain/ France. 2000. 110 mins. Marc Recha's third feature starts from the principle of focussing on tiny moods and moments rather than grand dramatic set-pieces and allowing a story to evolve spontaneously instead of marshalling events in a structured sequence. While potentially fruitful, the result in this ...
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Reviews
Taurus
Dir: Alexander Sokurov. Russia. 2001.90 mins. Alexander Sokurov's examination of fallible tyranny continues. After Moloch, in which Hitler and Eva Braun conducted what was often a non-relationship at Berchtesgarden, comes Taurus, in which Lenin, crippled by a stroke, negotiates a living death in a requisitioned mansion surrounded by strangers no ...
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Reviews
Human Nature
Directed by Michel Gondry. US-France. 96 mins."Civilization and Its Discontents," Freud's well-known treatise about the eternal conflict between biology and sociology, could have served as the subtitle for the droll, often clever Human Nature, Charlie Kaufman's follow-up script to his celebrated Oscar-nominated film, Being John Malkovich. As staged by ...
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Reviews
Kandahar (Safar E Ghandehar)
Dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Iran/ France. 2001. 85 mins. An astonishing journey through the archaic, rarely seen world of Afghanistan, Kandahar is a polished, sumptuously photographed indictment of conditions there. Aimed, with its part English-language soundtrack and scenes spelling out the political situation, squarely at an international audience it is, if ...
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Reviews
Under The Moonlight (Zir-E Nour-E Mah)
Dir: Reza Mir-Karimi. Iran. 2001. 96mins. The accessible face of Iranian cinema, Reza Mir-Karimi's second feature Under The Moonlight (Zir-E Nour-E Mah) tells the involving story of a young seminary student's crisis of vocation. Less austere and forbidding than many of the most critically lauded Iranian features of ...
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Reviews
Pearl Harbor
Dir: Michael Bay. US.2001. 182 mins.The best that can besaid about Michael Bay's Pearl Harbor, his colossal take on one of the most tumultuous events of Americanhistory, is that it's decidedly not a popcorn summer movie in the currentsense. Quite the opposite: Deviating from the recent spate of postmodern,intentionally anachronistic ...
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Reviews
Angel Eyes
Dir: Luis Mandoki. US 2001. 115 mins.A muddled blend of a supernatural thriller, romantic melodrama, and urban police-crimer, Angel Eyes, Jennifer Lopez' latest disappointing star vehicle, tries to do too much to little effect. Lifting a number of ideas and characters from Ghost and City Of Angels, ...
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Reviews
Apocalypse Now Redux
Dir: Francis Ford Coppola. US 2001. 197 min (without credits). Apocalypse Now Redux, Francis Ford Coppola's expanded and definitive version of his dazzling 1979 war epic, reaffirms its status as one of the highlights of the new American cinema and one of Coppola's undisputed masterpieces, along with The Godfather movies. ...
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Reviews
Shrek
Dirs: Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson. US. 2001. 90 mins.Shrek, DreamWorks' new enchanting animated feature, provides constant delights for the eye, while never neglecting the mind. The first American animation to receive its premiere as a competition entry at the Cannes Festival in half-a-century (since Peter Pan), Shrek represents a ...
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Reviews
The Man Who Wasn't There
Dir: Joel Coen. US. 2001. 117 mins.With their latest foray into film noir, Joel and Ethan Coen continue to explore a recurrent motif of their work: The destructive force of unbridled individualism, or more specifically, greed as the dark side of the American Dream. Arguably their most ambitious film since ...
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Reviews
Luhrmann's Sensory Overload
Dir: Baz Luhrmann. Australia/US. 2001. 124 minAussie wonder boy Baz Luhrmann continues to break rules and to shock in his new tragi-comic musical, Moulin Rouge his most audaciously innovative feature to date. Like his stylized dance melodrama Strictly Ballroom and his postmodern Shakespearean adaptation, Romeo + Juliet, the new musical, ...
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Reviews
Moulin Rouge
Dir: Baz Luhrmann. Australia/US. 2001. 124 minAussie wonder boy Baz Luhrmann continues to break rules and to shock in his new tragi-comic musical, Moulin Rouge his most audaciously innovative feature to date. Like his stylized dance melodrama Strictly Ballroom and his postmodern Shakespearean adaptation, Romeo + Juliet, the new musical, ...
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Reviews
Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Dir: John Madden. UK-US-FR. 2001. 125 minsWhile its aspirations and ingredients should ensure a strong release in all territories where the original Louis de Bernieres novel was triumphant, Captain Corelli's Mandolin curiously lacks harmony for a work with music as one of its core values. There is discord between its ...