All articles by Sheila Johnston – Page 4
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Reviews
Grill Point (Halbe Treppe)
Dir: Andreas Dresen. Germany. 2001. 105mins.Andreas Dresen's last film, Night Shapes (Nachtgestalten), acclaimed in Berlin three years ago, had a large cast of characters and a sprawling, Short Cuts-style story. Grill Point is a very different animal: an intimate, tightly focussed piece about two couples confronting mid-life crisis. Improvised by ...
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Reviews
Lost In La Mancha
Dirs: Keith Fulton, Louis Pepe. UK. 2001. 89mins.Lost In La Mancha is an enormously entertaining and poignant antidote to the bland "making of" films usually found as DVD add-ons and television plugumentaries. Instead of the traditional gushing interviews with cast and crew, this is the chronicle of an unmitigated disaster: ...
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Reviews
Safe Conduct (Laissez Passer)
Dir: Bertrand Tavernier. France. 2001. 170mins.An ambitious, enormously detailed portrait of a complex and (internationally, at least) little known footnote of World War II, Safe Conduct observes the film-makers working at the Continental, a German studio set up in Paris to produce French movies under the Occupation. Bertrand Tavernier's contention ...
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Reviews
Minor Mishaps (Sma Ulykker)
Dir: Annette K Olesen. Denmark. 2002. 109mins.That peculiarly Danish brand of bittersweet, intimate comedy finds its latest expression in Minor Mishaps, the story of a turbulent family reunion that combines many familiar Dogme elements (although it is not, in the strict sense, a Dogme film) with Mike Leigh's preparation for ...
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Reviews
America So Beautiful
Dir: Babak Shokrian. US. 2001. 91mins.There's an incontestable topical relevance to this tale of young Iranians in Los Angeles in 1979 whose dream of owning their own disco evaporates after the fall of the Shah and the American Embassy hostage drama in Tehran. Having studied in California and worked there ...
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Reviews
Women Talking Dirty
Dir: Coky Giedroyc. UK-US. 1999. 97mins. Although a long time in the works for the talent involved (it is Rocket Pictures' first production to hit the screens since the company was founded five years ago and director Coky Giedroyc's follow-up to her noted 1997 debut, Stella Does Tricks), Women Talking ...
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Reviews
Mean Machine
Dir: Barry Skolnick. UK. 2001. 99 mins. A loose remake and Anglicisation of Robert Aldrich's 1974 prison drama staring Burt Reynolds (released in some territories as The Longest Yard), Mean Machine is aimed at the same audience as Ska Films' most notable hits to date, Guy Ritchie's 1997 Lock, Stock ...
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Reviews
Seafood (Haixian)
Dir: Zhu Wen. China. 2001. 84mins. This idiosyncratic and extremely personal debut film by the poet-novelist Zhu Wen won't be to all tastes, but its offbeat sensibility and intriguing glimpses of a little-seen side of contemporary China earned it the Special Prize in the Cinema of the Present competition at ...
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Reviews
Smell Of Camphor, Fragrance Of Jasmine
Dir: Bahman Farmanara. Iran. 2001. 93mins. Bahman Farmanara's first film in 20 years is a semi-autobiographical meditation on death and art whose mordant comic tone is an acquired taste but still a rather elegant one. With the way already paved by international festival acclaim, the film's immediate appeal will be ...
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Reviews
Saturday (Sabado)
Dir: Juan Villegas. Argentina. 2001. 72mins. A brisk deadpan comedy about urban alienation and foundering relationships, Saturday generated mildly positive critical word-of-mouth in Venice earlier this year, where it played in the Cinema Of The Present section. Too lightweight and insufficiently original to make much impact in commercial terms, its ...
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Reviews
The Mystic Masseur
Dir: Ismail Merchant. UK. 2001. 117mins.The Mystic Masseur plays to the proven strengths of the Merchant-Ivory team: like much of their previous work, it depicts the contrast and clash of cultures in an exotic arena, backed by a literary pedigree, in this case VS Naipaul's first novel. A significant advance ...
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Reviews
Breve Traversee (Brief Crossing)
Dir: Catherine Breillat. France. 2001. 82 mins. While too slight, both dramatically and visually, to be entirely persuasive as a cinema feature, Catherine Breillat's contribution to a 10-part series commissioned by French broadcaster Arte "on the theme of difference and equality between the sexes" is an incisive and elegant chamber ...
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Reviews
Truly Human (Et Rigtig Menneske)
Dir: Aake Sandgren. Denmark. 2001. 93 mins. This sixth production from the Dogme 95 stable is a bittersweet fantasy variant on the "noble savage" genre that has exercised art-house films such as Francois Truffaut's L'Enfant Sauvage or Werner Herzog's The Enigma Of Kasper Hauser, as well as more mainstream fare ...
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Reviews
POV: Point Of View
Dir: Tomas Gislason. Denmark. 2001. 110 mins. One of the most striking and unusual films in San Sebastian's Zabaltegi New Directors section, POV: Point Of View is a visually brilliant, thematically skimpy homage to the classic American road movie that will provoke love-or-loathe reactions. Its most likely appeal is to ...
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Reviews
South West 9 (SW9)
Dir: Richard Parry. UK. 2001. 90 mins.South West 9 is aimed squarely at the kids from the British clubbing scene who made a huge hit out of 1999's Human Traffic, also produced by Fruit Salad Films (which, hoping to reproduce that success, has also taken over the distribution of the ...
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Reviews
Escape To Paradise
Dir: Nino Jacusso. Switzerland. 2001. 90 mins. The outstanding feature of this well-meaning but utterly predictable melodrama about a Kurdish family seeking political asylum is the zesty, touching and thoroughly convincing performances from a cast of mainly non-professionals playing heightened versions of themselves (a strategy which the film's credits pretentiously ...
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Reviews
Elling
Dir: Petter Naess. Norway. 2001. 90 mins. Playing in the Zabaltegi (New Directors) programme at San Sebastian, this sweet-tempered comedy about two eccentrics carving an unusual niche for themselves in society is a modest audience-pleaser which won the Youth Jury award by a comfortable margin and was given a Special ...
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Reviews
Work In Progress (En Construccion)
Dir: Jose Luis Guerin. Spain 2001. 125 mins. A humorous and poetic chronicle of the impact on a working-class neighbourhood of a major construction project, Work In Progress was one of San Sebastian's most original discoveries. Screened to a packed auditorium of over 1000, the film held the audience's attention ...
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Reviews
Stranded
Dir: Luna. Spain. 2001. 101 mins. The undisputed talking point of San Sebastian for all the wrong reasons, this $4.5m English-language space opera is a spectacular misfire on virtually every level. Its first press screening, in the New Directors section, unfolded in stunned silence punctured by incredulous laughter, but the ...
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Reviews
Ghislain Lambert's Bike
Dir: Philippe Harel. France/Belgium. 2001. 115 mins. A lively mock biopic of a failed Belgium racing cyclist, Ghislain Lambert's Bike (Le Velo De Ghislain Lambert) is a broad but entertaining comedy with excellent prospects in French-speaking markets and anywhere where cycling is a national obsession. Care will be needed to ...