Latest – Page 57
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Reviews
Hallam Foe
Dir: David Mackenzie. UK. 2007. 96mins. In Hallam Foe, Jamie Bell continues to slough off the shadow of Billy Elliot, while director David Mackenzie (Young Adam) gets back on confident form after his unsteady psychodrama Asylum. But while it has panache to spare, this very Scottish coming-of-age story suffers from ...
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Reviews
Don't Touch The Axe (Ne Touchez Pas La Hache)
Dir: Jacques Rivette. Fr-It. 2007. 137mins Elegance, austerity, high seriousness, barbed wit: this heady combination might not be to everyone's taste, but anyone susceptible to literary costume drama at its most intellectually substantial will be bowled over by Don't Touch The Axe, Jacques Rivette's surprisingly faithful adaptation of Balzac's novel ...
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Reviews
Desert Dream (Hyazgar)
Dir. Zhang Lu. Kor-Fr. 2007. 123mins. The joint efforts of a Chinese director, a Franco-Korean production team and Mongolian locations results in Desert Dream, a kindly, well intentioned but over-extended allegory which spreads itself thinly over slightly more than two hours. Zhang Lu's follow-up to his festival hit Grain In ...
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Reviews
Yella
Dir/writer: Christian Petzold. Germany 2007.89 minsFor some, existential business-world drama Yella will be the proverbial mystery wrapped within a riddle wrapped within an enigma. But for audiences with a taste for intellectual stimulation, Christian Petzold's film will be an invigorating tease: its sheer originality and stylistic confidence certainly hit the ...
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Reviews
Beaufort
Dir: Joseph Cedar. Is. 2007. 120mins Based on an award-winning, best selling documentary book by journalist Ron Leshem about the last stand of an Israeli unit in Southern Lebanon before their retreat in 2000, Joseph Cedar's painful and highly relevant film adaptation, while not addressing directly last summer's renewed outbreak ...
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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 ...
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Reviews
The Walker
Dir. Paul Schrader, USA, 2007, English, 107 minutes, colour.Writer/director Paul Schrader has built The Walker around a gay man of style and superficiality (Woody Harrelson) who escorts rich Washington women to lunch and to the cultural events that their powerful husbands scorn. When a friend's lobbyist lover ends up dead, ...
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Reviews
Getting Home (Luo Ye Gui Gen)
Dir. Khang Yang. China, 2007. 97 min.A road movie is by definition a mixed bag of goods. It can be funny one minute and trite the next, alternately brilliant and awkward, changing nature and tone as it goes along. Zhang Yang's new film may not be an exception to this ...
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Reviews
The Other (El Otro)
Dir: Ariel Rotter. Argentina/France/Germany. 84 mins.A city lawyer's mid-life crisis becomes an existential odyssey in Ariel Rotter's second feature. Politely received at its Berlinale press showing, this competition entry is intriguing and thought-provoking without ever being truly involving. There is much to admire in the formal devices that the film ...
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Reviews
When A Man Falls In The Forest
Dir. Ryan Eslinger, USA, English, 90 minutes, colour.When a Man Falls In The Forest stars Sharon Stone and Timothy Hutton as middle-aged victims of monotony in their marriage and their work. Yet the real victim of monotony in Ryan Eslinger's second feature is the audience. The dull drama, developed at ...
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Reviews
Mein Fuhrer: The Truly Truest Truth About Adolf Hitler (Mein Fuhrer - Die Wirklich Wahrste Wahrheit Uber Adolf Hitler)
It's not quite The Great Dictator, nor Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be (nor even Mel Brooks's remake of it). But for audacity and good intentions at least, Dani Levy's Hitler comedy Mein Fuhrer belongs in a more honourable tradition than its buffoonish tone immediately suggests. Despite some hostile ...
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Reviews
Witnesses (Les Temoins)
Dir: Andre Techine. France. 2007. 115minsTechine powerfully reasserts his status as one of European cinema's most adult film-makers in Witnesses, a complex, assured evocation of the mid-80s, when French society was first confronted with the reality of Aids. In a simple narrative framework - made a touch more complex by ...
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Reviews
Goodbye Bafana
Dir: Bille August. France/Germany/Belgium/Italy/South Africa 2007. 117 mins Denmark's double Palme d'Or laureate Bille August takes on one of modern historical cinema's holy grails, after a fashion: in its indirect way, GoodbyeBafana is nearly the Nelson Mandela story. But where he once scored with The Best Intentions, August's noble purpose ...
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Reviews
In Memory of Myself (In Memoria di Me)
Dir: Saverio Costanzo. Italy. 2007. 116 mins.Slow-paced and austerely beautiful, the second feature by Italian auteur Saverio Costanzo takes on a subject that seems inherently uncinematic: the crisis of faith of a young man who is studying to become a priest in a Jesuit seminary in Venice. And yet Costanzo ...
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Reviews
Hounds (Jagdhunde)
Dir: Ann-Kristin Reyels. Germany. 2007. 87mins.It's not easy to be cute and bleak at the same time, but Hounds, the debut feature from Ann-Kristin Reyels, pulls it off. An edgily tender coming-of-age story, it lays the acerbic social observation of Mike Leigh over the gritty provincial realism of the brothers ...
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Reviews
When Darkness Falls (Nar Morkret Faller)
Dir: Anders Nilsson. Swe-Ger. 2006. 135mins.A dark Swedish three-parter, When Darkness Falls makes up in gritty energy and social conscience what it lacks in structural cohesion. It doesn't so much weave together its three stories about how people deal when threatened; it simply runs with each one for 10 minutes ...
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Reviews
Eye In The Sky (Gen Zong)
Former Johnny To writer Yau Nai Hoi makes an astonishing genre film debut with Eye In The Sky. Slick, fast and at times even furious, it introduces a new directorial talent with considerable mastery of film language who should go far, even if his first work bears his master's imprint. ...
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Reviews
The Home Song Stories
Dir. Tony Ayres, Australia, 2007, 103 min.,With immigration dominating the headlines in Australia as well as in Europe and the US, The Home Song Stories is a period film that gives a twist on current news - a lively melodrama about a roll-with-the-punches beauty whose long march through marriages and ...
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Reviews
The Tracey Fragments
Dir: Bruce McDonald. Canada. 2007. 80mins.Canadian Bruce McDonald has moved in a new direction, forsaking gonzo humour for multi-image experimentation in this first-person portrait of an angry persecuted teenager that lurches between tactile realism and fantasy. McDonald (Road Kill, Highway 61, Hard Core Logo) will move beyond his core of ...
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Reviews
The Counterfeiters (Die Falscher)
Dir: Stefan Ruzowitzky. Aust-Ger. 2007. 98mins. A serious contender for one of this year's Bears, even a Golden one, Stefan Ruzowitzky's The Counterfeiters retells the Nazi attempt to sink the Allied economy by flooding it with counterfeit money. The film successfully tackles two issues. The first is whether concentration camp ...