Latest – Page 592
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Reviews
Vacancy
Dir: Nimrod Antal. US. 2007. 97mins. Hungary's Nimrod Antal, who made an international impression with his stylish Kontroll in 2003, makes a satisfying Hollywood debut with this tight, intense genre thriller that should be a tidy earner for Sony Pictures. The pitch - a couple finds themselves imprisoned in a ...
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Reviews
Perfect Stranger
Dir: James Foley. 2007. US. 109minsPerfect Stranger is perfect trash, crafted with all the costly polish and production values that Hollywood can muster. A throwback to lurid sex thrillers from the 1990s like Disclosure, Jade and Colour Of Night, it is the ultimate guilty pleasure, compulsively watchable, even when the ...
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Reviews
Fracture
Dir: Gregory Hoblit. US. 2007. 113mins. Dramatic thriller Fracture has a taut script and an attractive look, but what really elevates it above the genre norm are tasty performances from Anthony Hopkins and Ryan Gosling as, respectively, a clever murderer and the cocky young attorney assigned to put him behind ...
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Reviews
Disturbia
Dir: DJ Caruso. US. 2007. 105mins. A smart teen thriller that ably mixes suspense and adolescent melodrama, Disturbia boasts an articulate script and nuanced performances. Though Rear Window's voyeuristic premise provides the inspiration, this Paramount/DreamWorks release adds hints of Kubrick-ian chills and nicely understated insights into the tumultuous lives of ...
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Reviews
Provoked: A True Story
Dir: Jag Muhndra. India-UK. 112mins. Provoked is based on the true story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia, a Punjabi woman living in London who, in 1989, killed her abusive husband and was imprisoned for murder. Her battle for freedom eventually ended in the British legal definition of 'provocation' being re-defined in the ...
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Reviews
Sunshine
Dir: Danny Boyle. UK-US. 2007. 107mins. The sun is dying. Eight astronauts, 55 millions miles from Earth, are on a mission to re-ignite it and thereby save humanity. Thus begins Danny Boyle's highly impressive sci-fi thriller Sunshine, a work that combines eye-popping visuals with an eco-conscious screenplay and several striking ...
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Reviews
One Hundred Nails (Centochiodi)
Dir/scr: Ermanno Olmi. It. 2007. 92mins. Veteran Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi is a devout Catholic, and his work has long had a spiritual agenda. But even in such obvious parables as The Legend Of The Holy Drinker (which won a Golden Lion in Venice in 1988), the message is generally ...
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Reviews
Meet The Robinsons
Dir: Stephen Anderson. US. 2007. 94mins. Walt Disney Feature Animation's second computer-animated outing is a hyperactive mix of retro sci-fi, physical comedy and family drama. As zippy and colourful as it is, though, Meet The Robinsons is not as entertaining or endearing as the division's CG feature debut Chicken Little. ...
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Reviews
Grindhouse
Dirs: Robert Rodriguez/Quentin Tarantino. US. 2007. 192mins. Intended as an enthusiastically grimy, collagist tribute piece to low-budget, ultra-violent and offbeat exploitation flicks of yore, Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's Grindhouse delivers an uneven mixture of patchwork, sugar-rush thrills.Consisting of two discrete features strung together by a series of fake trailers ...
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Reviews
The Reaping
Dir: Stephen Hopkins. US. 2007. 99mins. After a recent sojourn working in television and cable, action director Stephen Hopkins pulls out all the stops with The Reaping. The result is a frenzied and unrestrained supernatural horror thriller, starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank as a debunker of religious phenomena enlisted ...
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Reviews
As You Like It
Dir: Kenneth Branagh UK-US. 2006. 127mins. Kenneth Branagh's fifth Shakespeare adaptation (after Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet and Love's Labour's Lost), As You Like It is a curiously undercharged affair. Handsomely and fluidly shot and intelligently performed, it nonetheless lacks spark. What should be a playful and magical ...
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Reviews
Borderland
Dir: Zev Berman. US. 2007. 104mins. A solidly professional exercise in the horror/thriller genre, Borderland will not disappoint those that like their suspense and gore laid on in equal measure, and nice and thick. Still, it doesn't rise significantly above other examples of the genre, and a commercial release in ...
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Reviews
Mr Bean's Holiday
Dir: Steve Bendelack. UK-US. 2007. 85mins If Rocky Balboa and John McClane can hit the comeback trail after a lengthy absence then who would deny a similar opportunity to Rowan Atkinson's one man disaster area' Ten years have passed since Bean but the public's affection for the gurning, bug-eyed loon ...
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Reviews
The Hills Have Eyes 2
Dir: Martin Weisz. US. 2007. 89mins. Hoping to wring more money from humans-vs-mutants battles to the death, The Hills Have Eyes 2 offers another round of dull gory fright scenes that neither push the horror envelope nor exhibit any noticeable ingenuity. Borrowing liberally from fear classics like Aliens and The ...
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Reviews
Shooter
Dir: Antoine Fuqua. US. 2007. 126 mins.Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg appears to be going more for box office gold than critical honours with Shooter, a handsome but seriously overblown action thriller from Training Day and King Arthur director Antoine Fuqua. Mashing up elements from the Rambo movies, TV action series ...
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Reviews
Elvis And Anabelle
Dir/scr: Will Geiger. US. 2007. 98mins. A warm-hearted and always smoothly-functioning depiction of small-town Texas life, Elvis And Anabelle is sweet-natured but lacks enough grit to push it beyond the DVD shelf. It's an offbeat love story, with a hint of the otherworldly about it, and the script and the ...
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Reviews
TMNT (TMNT)
Dir: Kevin Munroe. US. 2007. 87mins.Seventeen years after their cinematic debut, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles return with their sweetness and boyish tomfoolery intact. TMNT may substitute CG animation for the earlier films' live-action treatment, but the strongest ingredient remains the four reptiles' incorrigible charm, which easily outclasses a muddled ...
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Reviews
Reign Over Me
Dir/scr: Mike Binder. US. 2007. 125 minutes. Using the events of September 11 as a prism through which to refract one widower's swallowed anguish, writer-director Mike Binder's Reign Over Me is an astute, adult drama that grapples with issues of intervention and familial communication, and asks what is the socially ...
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Reviews
Blackbird
Dir/scr: Adam Rapp. US. 2007. 108 minutes. Screening in the Narrative Features Competition at Austin's SXSW Festival, this depressing film treads a well-worn path. Its familiar story features a 32-year-old heroin-addicted Marine veteran named Bayliss (Sparks) who meets another addict, a 16-year-old runaway from Detroit named 'Froggy' (Jacobs) at the ...
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Reviews
He Was A Quiet Man
Dir: Frank Cappello. US. 2007. 100 minutes. Screening in the Spotlight Premiere section of SXSW, He Was A Quiet Man is an excellent, unpredictable and often extremely witty film that is, alas, going to have a difficult time finding an audience. A dark comedy that is really quite comic but ...