Latest – Page 599
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Reviews
Trade
Dir: Marco Kreuzpaintner. US. 2007. 113mins.While unconvincing as a muck-raking look at how a network of foreign sex-slave traffickers can operate within the US, Trade often works as a gritty, sordid thriller due to the pulsating, viscerally kinetic direction by German director Marco Kreuzpaintner. Working in Mexico City and the ...
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Reviews
Grace Is Gone
Dir/scr: James C Strouse. US. 2007. 92mins.The strengths and limitations of Grace Is Gone exist in conjunction with each other. Intimately conceived and scaled, the work gathers a cumulative emotional power in the plaintive, sharply muted performance by John Cusack as a Midwestern everyman who struggles to find the proper ...
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Reviews
Year of the Dog
Dir/Scr: Mike White. US. 2007. 98mins. Mike White's outre wit and malicious satirical imagination is shown to sometimes spectacular effect in Year of the Dog. It is an alternately strange, puzzling and highly peculiar directing debut about a woman whose private trauma, coupled with her professional failure and romantic disappointment, ...
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Reviews
The Savages
Dir/scr: Tamara Jenkins. US. 2007. 113mins. The story of a brother and sister forced to care for their mentally diminished father, Tamara Jenkins's second feature The Savages examines with sensitivity, intelligence and jolting observation the vicissitudes of suffering, loss and human frailty. It's a serious work sharpened by prickly humour, ...
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Reviews
Zoo
Dir: Robinson Devor. US. 2007. 80mins.The much-awaited Zoo will draw enviable publicity (already evident at Sundance, where it premiered) because of the salacious nature of the story that inspired the film: the death from a perforated colon of a man who had sex with a horse in 2005 at a ...
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Reviews
The Hitcher
Dir: Dave Meyers. US. 2007. 84mins.The recent assembly-line remaking of recognisable horror titles continues with The Hitcher, a dreary updating of the 1986 Rutger Hauer serial-killer hitchhiker thriller, which disregards character empathy in the pursuit of perfunctory scares. Produced by (among others) Michael Bay, this new version of The Hitcher ...
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Reviews
An American Crime
Dir: Tommy O'Haver. US. 2007. 92mins.A horrifiying real-life crime from 1965 Indiana is recreated with almost scientific verisimilitude in Tommy O'Haver's first serious drama, An American Crime. Although often excruciating to watch, it is so well-crafted and well-acted that its portrait of casual savagery in the burbs resonates long after ...
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Reviews
Chicago 10
Dir: Brett Morgen. US. 2007. 103mins.The opening film at this year's Sundance, Chicago 10 revisits the violently suppressed anti-war demonstrations during the 1968 Democratic National Convention and the prosecution a year later of the colorful leaders who brought irreverent theatricality to political protest. Brett Morgen's documentary about those closely-watched events, ...
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Reviews
The Serpent (Le Serpent)
Dir: Eric Barbier. Fr. 2007. 119minsArriving a few months after Tell No One, Guillaume Canet's hit transposition of a Harlan Coben suspense bestseller, Eric Barbier's The Serpent performs an equally adept geographic makeover of a novel by late British suspense writer Ted (Get Carter) Lewis, Plender. The story is genre-familiar ...
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Reviews
The Monastery: Mr Vig & The Nun
Dir Pernille Rose Gronkjaer. Den. 2006. 84mins A slow burning, lovingly crafted documentary with a melancholy undertow, The Monastery benefits from a wonderfully eccentric protagonist. JorgenLauersen Vig is an 82-year-old Dane whose last goal in life is to turnhis castle into a monastery. If Spike Milligan and Andrei ...
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Reviews
Falafel
Michel Kammoun turns in a freshly confident feature debut with Falafel, which won second prize at the recent Dubai International Film Festival late last year. Set during one night in present-day Lebanon - imagine an Arabic-language After Hours - it's funny and energetic, dispensing insights without preaching them. Centred around ...
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Reviews
Smokin' Aces
Dir: Joe Carnahan. US-UK-Fr. 2006. 109minsThe body count stacks up like gambling chips in a high-stakes poker game in Smokin' Aces, a gleefully bloody, wickedly outrageous crime thriller set mostly in a Lake Tahoe casino hotel. Directed with Vegas-like flash by Joe Carnahan, the film is a giddy triumph of ...
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Reviews
Happily N'Ever After
Dir: Paul J. Bolger. US-Ger. 2006. 87mins.The animated subversion of fairytale conventions kick-started by Shrek continues in Happily N'Ever After, a thinly imagined, satirical retelling of the classic story of Cinderella that runs aground on the shoals of cheekiness courtesy mainly of an awkwardly forced irreverence.A wide release and some ...
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Reviews
Freedom Writers
Dir/scr: Richard LaGravenese. US. 2006. 122 minutes.Set against a backdrop of interracial, mutually destructive gang warfare, Freedom Writers is a passionately pitched if decidedly formulaic story of idealistic uplift, inspired by a true story in which Long Beach teenagers put their angst to paper in the charged years following the ...
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Reviews
Wolfhound (Volkodav)
Dir/scr: Nikolai Lebedev. Russ. 2006. 136mins.Russia's first proper foray into Tolkien-style fantasy film-making, Nikolai Lebedev's Wolfhound proves to be something of a mixed bag. On the one hand this holiday release feels formulaic, derivative and uneven in terms of acting and pacing; on the other it has enough novelty in ...
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Reviews
4 Elements
Dir/scr: Jiska Rickels. Neth. 2006. 89mins.Jiska Rickels' makes an impressive debut with feature-documentary 4 Elements, a self-consciously poetic film essay that has limited narration and little in the way of dialogue. Consisting of four self-contained segments, each representing one of the four elements - fire, water, earth and air - ...
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Reviews
Factory Girl
Dir: George Hickenlooper. US. 2006. 90mins.Sienna Miller does more than effectively capture doomed but beautiful 1960s pop art icon Edie Sedgwick with Factory Girl, George Hickenlooper's portrait of the Andy Warhol-anointed superstar that also conveys the elegant grunginess of the era.In the US, where Factory Girl enjoys a one-week Oscar-qualifying ...
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Reviews
Miss Potter
Dir: Chris Noonan. UK-US. 2006. 93mins.A period feature about a popular children's writer enduring a traumatic life, Chris Noonan's Miss Potter may follow in the footsteps of Shadowlands (about CS Lewis) and Marc Forster's Finding Neverland (about JM Barrie), but it lacks the emotional depth of either. Very handsomely crafted, ...
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Reviews
Dragon Tiger Gate (Lung Fu Mun)
Dir: Wilson Yip. HK. 2006.94mins.Adapted from a popular comic book, Dragon Tiger Gate is a slick butsuperficial martial arts adventure that boasts tremendous fight sequences(choreographed by co-star and co-producer Donnie Yen), colourful productiondesign and appealing central performances that cannot mask the flimsy andderivative storytelling.The film has already openedrobustly in Asia ...