All articles by Patrick Z McGavin – Page 3
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Reviews
Honeydripper
Dir/scr: John Sayles. US. 2007. 123mins. Relaxed, confident and very percussive in texture and mood, John Sayles' musical fable Honeydripper is the director's strongest work since Lone Star (1996). The story of a juke joint proprietor taking whatever measures necessary to save his country roadhouse, the movie showcases the film-maker ...
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Reviews
Glass
Dir: Scott Hicks. Australia . 2007. 122mins.The critical relationship of subject to filmmaker is the tipping point for most documentary portraits. It is the primary distinction between a probing and objective analysis and hagiography. In Scott Hicks' Glass, the composer Philip Glass has allowed the director unmediated exposure to his ...
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Reviews
Shadows
Dir/Scr: Milcho Manchevski. Macedonia 2007. 120mins.A ghost story that draws on the irrational to explore the historical and cultural redress of displaced Macedonians, Milcho Manchevski's third feature Shadows is ambitious and capably mounted. However it is too fastidious for its own good, and is damaged by dramatically contradictory parts that ...
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Reviews
The Babysitters
Dir. David Ross. US. 2007. 90mins.First time director David Ross negotiates a precarious line between exploitation and provocation with The Babysitters, the story of a bright and industrious teenager who fronts a high school escort service for bored suburban men. It inverts the story of Risky Business, moving away from ...
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Reviews
Trumbo
Dir: Peter Askin. US. 2007. 96mins.Peter Askin's endearing and sometimes strangely compromised documentary portrait Trumbo, a meditation on the life and times of the radical American screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, is an alternately rich and often bewildering mixture of theatre, family memoir and hot wired historical document.The film's portrait of an ...
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Reviews
The Princess of Nebraska
Dir: Wayne Wang. US. 2007. 77mins.Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska is a stylistically audacious companion piece to the director's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, adapted from the same collection of short stories by expatriate Chinese writer Yiyun Li. Like Blue in the Face, the improvisational variant of his ...
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Reviews
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Dir: Wayne Wang. US. 2007. 83mins.After a series of Hollywood assignments, the eclectic and unpredictable Wayne Wang has fashioned an old fashioned classical piece in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, written by the highly regarded Chinese writer Yiyun Li, who adapted her own short story. The minor key and ...
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Features
United states - Mumble-Mania
Joe Swanberg never wanted to change the world or rewrite the rules of cinema. He simply wanted to make movies, preferably on his own terms with a group of friends and collaborators.A Chicago-based independent film-maker, Swanberg has not only staked out a niche identity that has attracted a modicum of ...
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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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News
Middle East in the Midwest
As a slew of Iraq-themed films are readied for wide US theatrical release, Patrick Z McGavin talks to two film-makers about the appetite for the subject among financiers and audiences. After the breakout success of his second feature, The Illusionist, director Neil Burger had an enviable freedom when choosing his ...
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News
William Schopf and Ed Arentz: boxing clever
Starting life as an arthouse theatre, a specialty film distribution enterprise is thinking outside the Box. Patrick Z McGavin reports. The first time William Schopf (pictured) met film distribution consultant Ed Arentz to discuss opening a new specialty film distribution venture, Arentz did everything he could to dissuade Schopf from ...
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News
Festival fallout
The buzz about the films turned down by festivals is becoming as loud as the buzz about the films which are accepted. Ahead of Cannes, the biggest festival of them all, Patrick Z McGavin looks at why rejections are the talk of the town.At the 2004 Venice film festival, director ...
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Reviews
In The Land Of Women
Dir/scr: Jonathan Kasdan. US. 2007. 99mins. A first feature about a romantically failed young writer whose ideas and attitudes about women are dramatically shaken by a beautiful older woman and her daughter, Jonathan Kasdan's In the Land Of Women shows promise and ambition, abetted by strong acting and colourful writing. ...
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Reviews
The Reaping
Dir: Stephen Hopkins. US. 2007. 99mins. After a recent sojourn working in television and cable, action director Stephen Hopkins pulls out all the stops with The Reaping. The result is a frenzied and unrestrained supernatural horror thriller, starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank as a debunker of religious phenomena enlisted ...
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Features
United States - Southern man
Jeff Nichols was two years behind writer-director David Gordon Green at the North Carolina School of the Arts. After Green made his auspicious feature debut in 2000 with the poetic George Washington, Nichols took particular notice of his professional advice."He told me, 'Go make a movie. The only way (the ...
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Reviews
Shotgun Stories
Dir/scr: Jeff Nichols. US. 2007. 93mins. A measured and sobering meditation on violence and discontent, distilled through a blood feud that ruptures two clans of half-brothers, Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories is a highly intelligent and accomplished first feature that makes palpable suffering, loss and the wanton destructiveness of vengeance. Inexplicably ...
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Reviews
The Filthy World
Dir: Jeff Garlin. US. 2006. 86mins. 'I'm not a sadist, I did it one take,' John Waters says about the notorious climatic action of Pink Flamingos, his breakthrough underground assault of bourgeois refine and social taste whose debauchery ends with Divine, the 300-pound transvestite, ingesting dog faeces. Jean Renoir famously ...
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Reviews
Lagerfeld Confidential
Dir/scr: Rodolphe Marconi. Fr. 2007. 87mins. Flashy, dazzling if never quite penetrating, Lagerfeld Confidential, French film-maker Rodolphe Marconi's impressionistic documentary of fashion artist, costume designer and photographer Karl Lagerfeld, provides a relatively unvarnished examination of his reptilian charm, talent and considerable genius for promotion. The movie does a reasonable job ...
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Reviews
La Leon
Dir: Santiago Otheguy. Arg-Fr. 2007. 85mins. A ravishing portrait of loss and nature set in the evocative, strange Parana Delta wetlands near Buenos Aires, Santiago Santiago Otheguy's La Leon is a very impressively piece visually though marred by its prosaic storytelling. Shot in beautifully sculpted black and white widescreen, the ...