Latest – Page 589
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Reviews
To Each His Own Cinema (Chacun Son Cinema)
Dir: 35 leading directors. Fr. 2007. 120minsConceived as a homage to the 60th anniversary of the Cannes Film Festival, this improbable congeries and potentially incoherent work of cinema (35 different directors making three-minute shorts about the movie-going experience and their own introduction to the world of film) is surprisingly successful. ...
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Reviews
A Lost Man (Un Homme Perdu)
Dir: Danielle Arbid. Fr. 2007. 97 mins. Somewhere, buried deep down this pseudo-road movie that moves round in circles, there is a burning issue begging to be explored. All the more pity that Danielle Arbid never actually comes to grips with it, though it is pretty obvious the relations between ...
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Reviews
The Milky Way (A Via Lacteal)
Dir: Lina Chamie Brazil 2007. 88 mins. A cross-city drive turns into an existential odyssey in Lina Chamie's The Milky Way, which opened Cannes ' Critics Week sidebar. Part urban road movie, part stream-of-consciousness cinematic monologue, Milky Way layers flashbacks, bon mots about life and death, and variant versions of ...
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Reviews
Magnus
Dir/scr: Kadri Kousaar. Est/UK 2007. 86 mins Seamy low life, chic depression and off-the-wall humour make a heady if uneven mixture in the debut feature by Estonia's Kadri Kousaar. Magnus presents a morose, sometimes blackly witty view of life in contemporary Estonia from the point of view of a suicidal ...
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Reviews
The 11th Hour
Dir: Leila Conners Petersen & Nadia Conners. USA . 2007. 91 mins.Leonardo DiCaprio discreetly lends his weight as star and environmental campaigner to The 11th Hour, an unashamedly polemical documentary cum call-to-arms about the current dire state of the ecology - and future prospects for change. The film makes a ...
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Reviews
Actresses (Actrices)
Dir: Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Fr. 2007. 110mins Facing 40 becomes a wake-up call for a neurotic self-absorbed performer in Actresses, the second feature from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. Previously entitled Dream Of The Night Before, the film mines autobiographical material to explore the eternal conflict between professional success and personal happiness. ...
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Reviews
Tehilim
Dir: Raphael Nadjari. Fr / Is. 2007. 96 mins. Raphael Nadjari is back, digging again at the 'dialectical dimensions of Judaism' (as he calls it), a labour of love that he has persistently pursued in all his films to date. A quiet, subdued and remarkably controlled drama, fiercely introverted and ...
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Reviews
The Band's Visit (Bikur Hatizmoreth)
Dir/scr: Eran Kolirin. Is/Fr. 2007. 85 mins.This melancholy deadpan comedy accepted in three out of Cannes' four official sections and finally running in Un Certain Regard, is a kind of prestidigitator's tightrope act, almost crashing down several times before triumphantly reaching its goal in one piece.Though nothing much is happening ...
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Reviews
Water Lilies (Naissance des Pieuvres)
Dir/scr: Celine Sciamma. France 2007. 85 mins Every Cannes festival brings at least one sexually delicate French coming-of-age drama, and while Water Lilies is hardly mould-breaking, it's certainly an affecting and more than competent addition to the genre. Set against the eccentric background of synchronised swimming, Celine Sciamma's debut is ...
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Reviews
Breath (Soom)
Dir/scr: Kim Ki-Duk. Kor. 2007. 84 mins. Removing any pretence of reality for yet another of his existentialist essays on human nature, Kim Ki-Duk's bare-boned new film pairs a married woman with a man on death row, for an impossible love affair. But as this is, after all, Kim Ki-Duk ...
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Reviews
Savage Grace
Dir: Tom Kalin. US. 2007. 87 mins Fifteen years after his eye-catching debut Swoon, Tom Kalin returns with a second feature that also addresses a story of true-life transgression and its lethal consequences. The inspiration this time is the rise and demise of 1940s socialite Barbara Daly and the increasingly ...
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Reviews
Terror's Advocate (L'Avocat du terreur)
Dir: Barbet Schroeder Fr. 2007. 135 mins Renewing his fascination with monsters of modern times, Barbet Schroeder has created a weighty, wide-ranging portrait of devil's advocate Jacques Verges. It could also stand as a complex guide through the rise and rise of global terrorism. The controversial subject matter and Schroeder's ...
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Reviews
Sicko
Dir: Michael Moore. US. 2007. 123 mins. If it works, don't fix it. Michael Moore's passionate, bullying, gag-laced approach to the 'j'accuse' documentary worked a treat in Bowling for Columbine and Farenheit 9/11 - and it works even better in Sicko, his investigation of the US public healthcare system. Moore ...
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Reviews
Boarding Gate
Dir/scr: Oliver Assayas. Fr. 2007. 106mins. Maverick French director Oliver Assayas gets lost in transit with Boarding Gate, a transglobal thriller of dirty business deals and dirty sex that he has previously mined in Demonlover, with equally underwhelming results. Cannes ' out-of-competition 'Midnight Screening' is generally reserved for films that ...
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Reviews
Love Songs (Les Chansons d'Amour)
Dir/scr: Christophe Honore Fr. 2007. 95 mins The genre of the realist-inflected arthouse musical has intermittently thrived in France , ever since it was kick-started by Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Les Papapluies de Cherbourg). It's an institution that ambitious French directors have returned to with regularity, with even ...
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Reviews
Triangle (Tit Samgok)
Dirs: Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Johnnie To. HK-Chi. HK-Chi. 2007. 100mins.Not so much a portmanteau film as a cinematic relay race, Triangle sees three leading Hong Kong directors, each with their own team of scriptwiters, taking on three successive parts of a single thriller. Though it's a fascinating experiment, the ...
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Reviews
The Banishment (Izgnanie)
Dir: Andrey Zvyagintsev. 2007. Russ. 150minsThe Banishment struggles to carry the burden of expectations surrounding the second feature from writer-director Andrey Zvyagintsev. Like his Venice Golden Lion winner The Return, it offers a tale of pride and patriarchy illuminating the dark soul of the Russian male. It confirms Zvyagintsev as ...
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