All articles by Lee Marshall – Page 43
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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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News
Editorial opinion: rise of the machines
The increasing use of CG and green screen shows it ain't what you've got, but how you use it, says Lee Marshall.In one of this autumn's most hotly anticipated releases - Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf - Angelina Jolie plays a sexy seductress who attempts ...
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Critical opinion: oeuvre and out
The financial backing that allowed Antonioni and Bergman to create such distinctive bodies of work is absent for today's young, says Lee MarshallMuch has already been written about the same-day demise of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni - not least that it's probably the most prominent Grim Reaper double whammy ...
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Editorial opinion: chasing the tale
Story doesn't get the credit it deserves in most contemporary discussions of cinema. Or, come to it, in the industry's own categories of merit.It wasn't always so: between 1940 and 1956, a best story Oscar ran alongside that for best original screenplay; then, in 1957, it was quietly retired, and ...
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Reviews
Kings
Dir: Tom Collins. Ire-UK. 91mins.A melancholy drama of Irish displacement, Kings has 'based on a stage play' written all over it. Not only in a negative sense: this study of the unfulfilled hopes, dreams and promises of five friends who moved to London from the west of Ireland years before ...
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Reviews
Kremen
Dir: Aleksei Mizgiryov. Russ. 2007. 83mins.Perhaps the Taormina festival catalogue errs a little on the side of enthusiasm in comparing Aleksei Mizgiryov's debut feature Kremen to Taxi Driver. But there is something in the claim: like Scorsese's classic, this is a tale of a disturbed, asocial innocent with a rigid ...
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Reviews
Man Of Glass (Uomo Di Vetro)
Dir: Stefano Incerti. It. 2007. 96mins.A worthy addition to the modern canon of Italian mafia films, Man Of Glass tells the true story of Leonardo Vitale, the first Sicilian mafioso to turn state's evidence and reveal the inner workings of the powerful Palermo branch of Cosa Nostra. Like The Hundred ...
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News
Critical opinion: the people's choice
When critics bemoan the state of Hollywood movies, they are also implicitly - and unfairly - criticising the film-going public who flock to see them, says Lee MarshallThe back-to-back releases of Spider-Man 3, Shrek The Third and Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End have generated a spate of op-eds ...
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Reviews
Inside (A l'Interieur)
Dirs: Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo. Fr. 2007. 80mins.Imagine a graphic, feature-length riff on that line in Macbeth about Macduff being 'from his mother's womb untimely ripped' and you have the kernel of Inside, a vicious gore-fest, which seems designed to prove that Europeans too can up the horror stakes too ...
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News
Critical view: breaking the rules
Romania's cash-poor but ideas-rich film industry is proving that necessity is the mother of invention with a string of influential titles. What's the secret formula, asks Lee MarshallWhat is it about those Romanians' The Eastern European country's cash-strapped film industry manages to squeeze out no more than 10 full-length features ...
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Reviews
Calle Santa Fe
Dir: Carmen Castillo. Chile-Fr-Bel. 164mins.Beginning as a reconstruction of the October 1977 police shooting of Chilean underground Marxist leader Miguel Enriquez, Calle Santa Fe is a long but ultimately compelling documentary both celebrates the anti-Pinochet resistance and subjects it to testing questions. These are made all the more incisive and ...
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Reviews
Secret Sunshine (Miryang)
Dir: Lee Chang-dong. S Kor. 2007. 133mins.An uncompromising experiment in how much suffering a soul can take, both on screen and in one's cinema seat, Lee Chang-dong's follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Oasis makes for an original but ultimately gruelling two-and-a-quarter hours' viewing. This contemporary, twisted parable of Job is impressive, ...
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Reviews
The Mourning Forest (Mogari no Mori)
Dir: Naomi Kawase. Japan/France 2007. 98 mins.Naomi Kawase is one of those directors who usethe medium of film to work through their obssessions. In her case,these include fractured families, the aftermath of a loved one's deathor disappearance, rural Japanese traditions, the spiritual luminosityof the elderly and infirm. Luckily for audiences ...
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Reviews
Death Proof
Dir/scr: Quentin Tarantino. USA 2007. 115 mins. Quentin Tarantino should go back to making films that matter. If the shorter, Grindhouse version of Death Proof, his hybrid slasher meets car chase homage to early 1970s B-movies, hinted that everyone's favourite cult director was running out of creative gas, the full-length ...
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Reviews
Ploy
Dir/scr: Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Thai. 2007. 105 mins. Thai auteur Pen-ek Ratanaruang's most mature, measured film to date, Ploy offers a darkly poetic variation on the theme of The Seven Year Itch. Though its slow pacing demands a certain patience, the slow waltz of story, editing and camerawork goes beyond the ...
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Reviews
Paranoid Park
Dir/scr: Gus Van Sant. US-Fr. 2007. 85mins.Gus Van Sant is such a consummate filmmaker, so in love with the visual and aural texture of the medium, that it's difficult at first to pinpoint the niggling problem with Paranoid Park, his most experimental feature to date. It's not that Van Sant ...
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Reviews
All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonnee)
Dir/scr: Mia Hansen-Love. France 2007. 105 mins.Debut director Mia Hansen-Love turns seemingly random slices from the life of a disintegrating family unit into a remarkably graceful, natural film about what it is to be human. Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of this hopeful parable of failure is the way casting, ...
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Reviews
Blind Mountain (Mang Shan)
Dir/scr/prod: Li Yang. Ch. 2007. 103 mins. Li Yang demonstrates once again that he is a master of cinematic tension with his second feature, Blind Mountain . Based on the widespread practice of bride trafficking in rural China, this harrowing but limpidly shot story of the abduction and sale of ...