Latest – Page 27
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Reviews
Mad Detective
Dir. Johnny To, Wai Ka Fai. Hong Kong 2007. 89 min.The prolific Johnny To and his occasional collaborator Wai Ka Fai here put a new twist on the standard police yarn. No longer simply good cop versus bad cop, they add a third angle, the mad cop, who uses neither ...
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Reviews
Cargo 200 (Gruz 200)
Dir: Alexey Balabanov, Russia 2007, 86minsAlexey Balabanov's eleventh feature is one of his bleakest. Set in provincial Russia in 1984 as the USSR enters its death throes, it portrays a society that is sickly, violent and cynical. The title refers to the name given to corpses of Russian soldiers being ...
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Reviews
Don't Think About It (Non Pensarci)
Dir: Gianni Zanasi Italy 2007. 108 mins.The real surprise of the 2007 Venice Days sidebar on the Lido , Don't Think About It is that rarest of things: an exportable Italian comedy that features neither Roberto Benigni nor Nanni Moretti. Directed with an admirable lightness of touch by Gianni Zanasi ...
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Reviews
The Sweet and the Bitter (Il Dolce e l'Amaro)
Dir: Andrea Porporati Italy 2007. 99 mins.The Italian Mafia film comes of age with The Sweet and the Bitter, a Sicilian Goodfellas that offers a refreshingly unheroic, sometimes darkly comic take on the grubby reality behind the rituals and myths of Cosa Nostra. Like another recent title, Stefano Incerti's L'Uomo ...
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Reviews
Exodus
Dir: Penny Woolcock UK 2007. 110 mins.As much community project as feature film, Exodus transplants the Biblical story of Moses and the children of Israel to the depressed British seaside resort of Margate, in a dystopian future where racist politicians hold sway and asylum seekers are fenced inside a refugee ...
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Reviews
Mother of Tears
Dir/Scr: Dario Argento. Italy. 2007 98mins .The new work of Italian horror specialist Dario Argento, Mother of Tears forms a trilogy of the two macabre, hyper stylized works that made his international reputation: Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980). The time away from the material has certainly not dulled the director's ...
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Reviews
Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame (Buda As Sharm Foru Rikht)
Dir: Hana Makhmalbaf. Iran / France , 2007. 81 min. Hana Makhmalbaf is the younger scion of the Makhmalbaf Film House factory. All of eighteen years old and already a veteran with a short film, a documentary and a book of poems to her credit, she handles this first feature ...
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Reviews
Chaos (Heya fawda)
Dir: Youssef Chahine France/Egypt 2007. 122 minsVeteran Egyptian director Youssef Chahine serves up a stirring, old-fashioned melodrama with a liberal conscience in his latest film, co-directed with his younger colleague Khaled Youssef. As imbued with the sounds, colours and passions of Cairo as a novel by Naguib Mahfouz, the film ...
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Reviews
12 (Razgnevannyh Muzhchin)
Dir: Nikita Mikhalkov Russia 2007. 158 mins.Russian maestro Nikita Mikhalkov proves that Sidney Lumet's classic jury drama 12 Angry Men can work in another time and another place in this tasty adaptation, which is tough and passionate enough to survive the occasional lapse into Slavic sentimentality. It's hard to believe ...
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Reviews
Disengagement
Dir. Amos Gitai. France / Israel / Germany / Italy , 2007. 115 mins.Amos Gitai's systematic chronicle of modern Israeli history reaches one of its more sensitive and inevitable points in this dramatised version of the recent crisis generated by the unilateral decision, taken by the Sharon government, to dismantle ...
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Reviews
The Secret Of The Grain (La Graine Et Le Mulet)
Dir/Scr: Abdellatif Kechiche , France , 2007, 153mins.A cine-verite tour-de-force, Abdellatif Kechiche's follow-up to the award- winning L'Esquive loads an apparently slight story set against the background of France 's first-and-second generation Maghrebi immigrant communities with surprising dramatic weight. There's even less story and even more of the director's trademark ...
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Reviews
The Hunting Party
Dir: Richard Shepard USA 2007. 100mins A textbook study in the dangers of trying to have one's cake and eat it, The Hunting Party mixes earnest sentimentality and black comedy in an unlikely yarn about the search for a Bosnian Serb war criminal by a maverick TV news crew. On ...
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Reviews
The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (Les Amours D'Astree et de Celadon)
Dir: Eric Rohmer France /Spain/Italy 2007. 109minsThere are two Eric Rohmers. The more popular is the detached comic observer of modern emotional dilemmas, the maker of the Moral Comedies and Four Seasons series. The other is a sometimes forbidding experimental contriver of historical and literary dramas, such as Perceval le ...
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Reviews
Far North
Dir: Asif Kapadia France/UK. 89 mins.With this dark tale of a supernaturally-tinged love triangle dark set in the frozen wastes of the Arctic Circle, Asif Kapadia returns to the myth-rooted dreamscape of his 2001 debut, The Warrior, after an uninspiring studio hiatus (Rogue/Focus Features' horror-flop The Return). But as a ...
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Reviews
Fallen Heroes (Nessuna qualità agli eroi)
Dir: Paolo Franchi It/Switz. 2007. 100 mins.Paolo Franchi is the true heir to Antonioni among the current crop of young Italian directors: he's fascinated by passive, blocked, brooding characters, by emotions that can hardly be translated into images, let alone words. And like the films of the late lamented Ferrarese ...
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Reviews
The Living and the Dead (Zivi I Mirtvi)
Dir: Kristijan Milic. Bosnia-Herzegovina/Croatia, 2007. 90 mins.The winner of theGrand Prixat The 54th Pula Film Festival,garnering seven awards in total (including best picture and director), The Living and the Dead is a striking examination of war-fever, unadulterated and Balkan-style. Kristijan Milic's debut film will strike a familiar chordwith its own ...
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Reviews
Beneath The Rooftops of Paris (Sous Les Toits De Paris)
Dir: Hiner Saleem. France, 2007. 100minsThis study of old age and solitude finds exiled Kurdish director Hiner Saleem divesting himself of the mischievous drive and wicked sense of humour which permeated such earlier efforts as Vodka Lemon and Kilometre Zero. Launched in a light, warm and humanistic vein which keeps ...
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Reviews
Irina Palm
Dir: Sam Garbarski Bel-Ger-Lux-UK-Fr. 2007. 103mins It may be the work of a German-born, Belgian-based director, but Euro co-production Irina Palm is a thoroughly British film at heart - the latest in that 'naughty-but-nice' vein of stories that delight in placing genteel English matrons in risque situations. Sam Garbarski's film ...