Latest – Page 588
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Reviews
The Edge Of Heaven (Auf Der Anderen Seite)
Dir/scr: Fatih Akin. Ger/Tur. 2007. 122 mins. Though it's far below the level of his debut film, Head-On, which won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2003, Fatih Akin's new film, once it comes together at the end and finally defeats the shagginess of his script, is a solid if ...
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Reviews
Back To Normandy (Retour A Normandie)
Dir: Nicolas Philibert. Fr. 2006. 113 mins Any documentary is an act of remembrance. Back To Normandy has a special personal significance for director Nicolas Philibert because it allows him to return to the scene of his earliest filmmaking experiences and also to pay homage to his mentor Rene Allio. ...
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Reviews
Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End
Dir: Gore Verbinski. US. 2007. 167mins.Disney's Pirates Of The Caribbean trilogy coasts to its conclusion with At World's End, a third instalment that adds nothing very exciting to the franchise's formula but spins out the familiar elements with just about enough energy and inventiveness to warrant an almost three-hour running ...
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Reviews
Go Go Tales
Dir/scr: Abel Ferrara. It/US. 2007. 96 mins Abel Ferrara , king of New York low-life drama, slips into more benign mode than usual with Go Go Tales, a good-natured but somewhat half-baked evocation of life backstage at a lap dancing club. The ensemble comedy, with its decided stylistic debt to ...
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Reviews
Chop Shop
Dir: Ramin Bahrani. US. 2007. 84 mins A flawlessly observed piece of street realism, and an unforgiving parable of American economic reality, Chop Shop is a compelling follow-up to Man Push Cart, Ramin Bahrani's 2005 debut. Using a non-professional cast to convincingly natural effect, the film follows in the tradition ...
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Reviews
Deficit
Dir: Gael Garcia Bernal. Mex. 2007. 75 minutes. If sincere commitment and high spirits were enough, this first film by the supremely accomplished - even though still quite young - Mexican actor and heartthrob, Gael Garcia Bernal (Y Tu Mama Tambien, Motorcycle Diaries, Bad Education) would be a masterpiece. Alas, ...
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Reviews
Counterparts (Gegenueber)
Dir: Jan Bonny. Ger. 2007. 96 mins. A study in midlife crisis verging on pathologic hysteria, Jan Bonny's debut may be of some interest to sympathetic psychoanalysts dealing in Freudian hang-ups but won't go far with audiences at large, who are bound to lose their patience with the two leading ...
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Reviews
Silent Light (Stellet Licht)
Dir: Carlos Reygadas. Mex-Fr-Neth. 2007. 142 mins.Mexican auteurist Carlos Reygadas has lost nothing of the aesthetic austerity so magnificently, if exhaustingly, on display in his first two films, Japon (2002) and Battle In Heaven (2005). Both of those films proved exceptionally demanding on audiences, both narratively and psychologically, but for ...
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Reviews
After Him (Apres Lui)
Dir: Gael Morel. Fr. 2007. 90 mins A mother's grief warps into a suffocating obsession in Apres Lui, a sombre study of aching loss and broken hearts. The latest feature from Gael Morel (Le Clan, A Toute Vitesse etc) is a typically dour, unsentimental drama that refuses to sweeten the ...
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ReviewsThe Diving Bell And The Butterfly (Le Scaphandre Et Le Papillon)
Dir:Julian Schnabel. 2007.France 112 mins
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Reviews
Death Proof
Dir/scr: Quentin Tarantino. USA 2007. 115 mins. Quentin Tarantino should go back to making films that matter. If the shorter, Grindhouse version of Death Proof, his hybrid slasher meets car chase homage to early 1970s B-movies, hinted that everyone's favourite cult director was running out of creative gas, the full-length ...
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Reviews
Ploy
Dir/scr: Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Thai. 2007. 105 mins. Thai auteur Pen-ek Ratanaruang's most mature, measured film to date, Ploy offers a darkly poetic variation on the theme of The Seven Year Itch. Though its slow pacing demands a certain patience, the slow waltz of story, editing and camerawork goes beyond the ...
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Reviews
A Mighty Heart
Dir: Michael Winterbottom. US. 2007. 108 mins Michael Winterbottom has become a master at relating dramatic true stories in a documentary style. He brings a typical intelligence and urgency to A Mighty Heart, the 2002 case of the kidnap and execution of American journalist Daniel Pearl. The star casting of ...
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Reviews
Paranoid Park
Dir/scr: Gus Van Sant. US-Fr. 2007. 85mins.Gus Van Sant is such a consummate filmmaker, so in love with the visual and aural texture of the medium, that it's difficult at first to pinpoint the niggling problem with Paranoid Park, his most experimental feature to date. It's not that Van Sant ...
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Reviews
XXY
Dir: Lucia Puenzo. Arg/Sp/Fr. 2007. 91 mins The familiar agonies of adolescence are given a fresh slant and a perceptive treatment in XXY, a quietly impressive first feature from novelist and documentary maker Lucia Puenzo, daughter of The Official Story (1985) director Luis Puenzo. Refusing to sensationalise the subject of ...
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Reviews
Garage
Dir: Lenny Abrahamson. Ir. 2007. 85 mins.Calling Garage a 'small' film would be true enough, but the Hope diamond, all things considered, is awfully small as well. Both, in any case, are gems. The second feature of director Lenny Abrahamson, following his well-received debut film Adam & Paul, which won ...
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Reviews
Import Export
Dir: Ulrich Seidl. Aust. 2007. 135 mins.Very much in the vein of his best-known film, Dog Days (2001), Austrian auteur and documentarian Ulrich Seidl continues in this, his first fiction film in 6 years, to explore the darker aspects of human existence. His unremittingly depressing view of the human condition ...
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Reviews
All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonnee)
Dir/scr: Mia Hansen-Love. France 2007. 105 mins.Debut director Mia Hansen-Love turns seemingly random slices from the life of a disintegrating family unit into a remarkably graceful, natural film about what it is to be human. Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of this hopeful parable of failure is the way casting, ...
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Reviews
Blind Mountain (Mang Shan)
Dir/scr/prod: Li Yang. Ch. 2007. 103 mins. Li Yang demonstrates once again that he is a master of cinematic tension with his second feature, Blind Mountain . Based on the widespread practice of bride trafficking in rural China, this harrowing but limpidly shot story of the abduction and sale of ...