Latest – Page 714
-
Reviews
Exit Wounds
Dir: Andrzej Bartkowiak. US. 2001. 100 mins. Looking to make a comeback after a run of commercial disappointments, Steven Seagal teams up on Exit Wounds with action king producer Joel Silver and hot rapper DMX. It's a canny move which should bring in both older white males and younger black ...
-
Reviews
Bridget Jones's Diary
Dir: Sharon Maguire. UK. 2001. 90minsTBC.Bridget Jones's bestselling diaries made the fictional thirtysomething singleton Britain's most successful under-achiever of recent years, and the screen version of her intimate journal bears all the signs of becoming the UK's biggest film hit since Notting Hill. Domestically, massive advance publicity and media attention ...
-
Reviews
Blame It On Voltaire
Dir: Abdellatif Kechiche. France.130mins.Honoured as the best first film atlast year's Venice Film Festival, Blame It On Voltaire is a flawed butaffecting account of an illegal immigrant's adventures in Paris. Though localfilms by and about North Africans (notably Algerians) have long been part ofthe French film scene, first-time writer-director Kechiche ...
-
Reviews
Blow Dry
Dir: Paddy Breathnach. US-UK. 2001. 91minsA large ensemble of talented actors, including Alan Rickman, Natasha Richardson and Rachel Griffiths, is totally wasted in the disappointing comedy Blow Dry, written by The Full Monty screenwriter, Simon Beaufoy. Meant to be a funny satire of an annual British hairdressing championship, Blow Dry ...
-
Reviews
Brotherhood Of The Wolf
Dir: Cristophe Gans. France. 2001. 143mins.Hailed as the prototype for a new genre-bending kind of popular European cinema, Brotherhood Of The Wolf is a crazy quilt of historical romance, horror movie, frontier saga, conspiracy thriller and martial arts actioner. One can only admire the sheer chutzpah of writer-director Christophe Gans, ...
-
Reviews
The Mexican
Dir: Gore Verbinski. US. 2001. 125mins.The first pairing of Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt, Hollywood's beloved stars, proves to be a mixed blessing in Gore Verbinski's The Mexican, a mishmash of a movie in which different genres and different styles compete aggressively and strenuously for the viewers' attention. Although the ...
-
Reviews
Mullet
Writer-director David Caesar's third feature, his first since the admired Idiot Box (1996), is a small-budget, small-scale character study surprisingly showing in widescreen 35mm and six-track Dolby. Though rich in Australian idiom and seldom exploited southern New South Wales coastal scenery, Mullet's theatrical ambitions seem overstretched. Its true home is ...
-
Reviews
Risk
Dir: Alan White. Australia. 2000. 90mins. Award-winning commercials and music video director AlanWhite made his 1999 feature debut with the grittily realistic ErskinevilleKings, set in a crumbling inner-suburban Sydney. With Risk he visitsthe top end of town - ritzy apartments, sleek corporate offices with powerfulcityscape views - but fails ...
-
Reviews
15 Minutes
Dir. John Herzfeld. US. 2001. 120 mins.Andy Warhol's prophecy that everyone will one day achieve their own quarter-hour of fame gets yet another Hollywood workout in John Herzfeld's actioner, 15 Minutes - this time with two foreign criminals as media-hungry badasses. Robert De Niro, well-cast as a superstar homicide detective, ...
-
Reviews
See Spot Run
Dir: John Whitesell. US. 2001. 94 mins.Aimed squarely at an audience of families with younger children, See Spot Run does not waste much effort on subtleties. The comedy is a mix of basic slapstick and potty humour, while the plot spins a sugary romance around a perky blonde, an orphaned ...
-
Reviews
Monkeybone
Dir: Henry Selick. US. 2000. 92mins.For all its manic energy and elaborately-designed fantasy elements, Monkeybone, director Henry Selick's live-action follow-up to his acclaimed animated outings The Nightmare Before Christmas and James And The Giant Peach, feels disappointingly flat. The film (based on the graphic novel Dark Town) appears to be ...
-
Reviews
JSA - Joint Security Area
Screened at Berlin (Competition). Dir: Park Chan-Wook. South Korea. 2000. 110mins. If nothing else, Korean director Park Chan-Wook's JSA - Joint Security Area can boast a highly unusual setting for its drama - the border between North and South Korea, the last flashpoint of the defunct Cold War. It is ...
-
Reviews
Betelnut Beauty
Screened at Berlin (Competition) Dir: Lin Cheng-sheng. Taiwan-China-France. 2000. 106mins.Young people struggling to find a meaningful life in the urban sprawl of Asian megacities like Taipei and Beijing is not a new premisefor a film, but Lin Cheng-sheng's Betelnut Beauty is a standoutnonetheless. Fully deserving the best director award ...
-
Reviews
Ignorant Fairies
Screened at Berlin (Competition).Directed by Ferzan Ozpetek. Italy/France. 2000. 105mins.The clash between cultures has been the pivotal focus in Turkish-born - but who has lived in Rome since 1978 - director Ferzan Ozpetek's work. His first feature, Hamam - The Turkish Bath (Il Bagno Turco), about a Italian man's sexual ...
-
Reviews
MallBoy
Dir: Vincent Giarrusso. Australia. 2000. 85 mins.The overlit candy-coloured shopping mall where 14 year old Shaun and his aimless school-skipping friends spend a large part of their days is so shockingly familiar it might be anywhere in the developed or semi-developed world, which gives this small-scale Australian movie a genuinely ...
-
Reviews
Princesa
Dir: Henrique Goldman. Italy/Germany/Brazil. 2000. 96 mins. Along with acclaimed documentary Southern Comfort and musical Hedwig And The Angry Inch, Henrique Goldman's absorbing Princesa blazed a trail at this year's Sundance Film Festival for movies with transgender heroes or heroines. Centred around a Brasilian transvestite working as a prostitute in ...
-
Reviews
The Finder
Dir: Frank Shields. Australia. 2000. 90 mins.Long-time producer Phil Avalon's considerable achievement in raising enough private finance to make this Australian crime thriller from his own script would have been infinitely greater if the finished movie, launched during the American Film Market in LA, wasn't so lazily derivative.The concept is ...
-
Reviews
3000 Miles To Graceland
The Tarantino effect is very much in evidence in 3000Miles To Graceland, a trashy, excessively violent action movie about a casinoheist that goes hilariously and uproariously awry. Using the iconic Elvis Presley and his ostentatiousattire as a conceit, the yarn is set against the background of the glitzy,high-energy chaos surrounding ...
-
Reviews
Fat Girl (A Ma Soeur!)
Screened at Berlin (Competition). Dir: Catherine Breillat. France-Italy. 2001mins. No European director, and certainly no female European film-maker, has made a more audacious series of films than Catherine Breillat. There are times, in fact, when she seems to court controversy. In this respect, Fat Girl carries on where Romance left ...
-
Reviews
The Tailor Of Panama
Brosnan too suave by halfThe Tailor Of PanamaDerek Malcolm in BerlinScreened at Berlin (Panorama). Dir: John Boorman. US-Ireland. 2001. 111mins.Rumours that the ending of The Tailor Of Panama was changed so that Pierce Brosnan's spy doesn't get killed but flies off instead towards a prosperous future hints at what is ...