All articles by Lee Marshall – Page 42
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Reviews
La Maison
Dir: Manuel Poirier. France 2007. 96 mins.French director Manuel Poirier delivers his most convincing feature since the bittersweet 1997 road-movie Western with La Maison, an emotionally delicate romantic comedy that once again features Poirier regular Sergi Lopez in the lead role. A rural house that's up for sale becomes a ...
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Reviews
Mataharis
Dir: Icair Bollain. Spain 2007. 94 mins.A bittersweet tale of frustrated lives and loves centring on three female private investigators, Mataharis is a decently plotted but decidedly tame follow-up to Icair Bollain's previous film, the convincing 2003 wife-abuse drama Take My Eyes. A leading Spanish actress, Bollain was inspired to ...
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Reviews
Earth
Dir: Alastair Fothergill/Mark Linfield. UK/Germany 2007. 98 mins.Probably the most ambitious nature documentary ever produced, Earth is a feature-length condensation of the eleven-part BBC series Planet Earth, broadcast in the UK in 2006 and on Discovery Channel in the US in spring 2007. Better than a trip to the zoo, ...
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Reviews
Foul Gesture (Tnuah Meguna)
Dir: Tzahi Grad. Israel 2006. 96 mins.A satirical social comedy turns into a terrific, slow-burn revenge drama in Israeli actor Tzahi Grad's second directorial outing. Though the rough, low-budget production values will put off mainstream distributors, arthouse and genre specialists should take a look at this title, whose strong script ...
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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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News
Festival review: Venice
Critical wrapMarco Mueller may have been pipped to the post by a fictitious candidate, L.K. Ching, in an informal poll of (mostly Italian) festivalgoersorganised outside Venice's Casino to choose the next festival director(it was 603 for Ching, 601 for Muller). But most international festivalhabitues agreed that Mueller had come up ...
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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
Nightwatching
Dir: Peter Greenaway, Netherlands-Canada-Poland-UK. 140mins.Peter Greenaway takes The Night Watch - arguably Rembrandt's most famous painting, and certainly his most earnestly discussed and interpreted work - as the basis for a rambling, theatrical, frequently didactic study of a turning point in the Dutch painter's life. By turns both murder mystery, ...
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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
Blood Brothers (Tian Tang Kou)
Dir: Alexi Tan, Taiwan/China/Hong Kong, 2007. 95minsThe closing film at the Venice film festival, Blood Brothers is a dark gangster fable set in 1930s Shanghai - and a stylish but hollow debut for John Woo protege Alexi Tan. For all the film's lush cinematography, spot-on period detail and all-star Asian ...
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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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News
Critical Mass - the sci fi and Westerns debate
Sci-fi films are as 'dead as Westerns', according to Ridley Scott. He recently informed us of the future genre's demise while in Venice to present the 'definitive' director's cut of Blade Runner, which he began working on in 2000. One senses a certain desire for closure.Of course, Sir Ridley's obituary ...
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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
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
The Darjeeling Limited
Dir: Wes Anderson USA 2007. 91 mins.Wes Anderson treads water, or maybe lime tea, with The Darjeeling Limited, the latest quirky philosophical comedy from the US maverick. This tale of three brothers who meet up on an Indian train to bond and find themselves has a kooky, laid back charm ...
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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 ...
