All Toronto articles – Page 155
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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Dalton Trumbo, is an alternately rich and often bewildering mixture of theatre, family memoir and hot wired historical document.The film's portrait of an ...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
In Bloom
Dir: Vadim Perelman. US. 2007. 90 mins.Four years after his directorial debut The House Of Sand And Fog, Vadim Perelman returns with In Bloom, an adaptation of Laura Kasischke's novel The Life Before Her Eyes which is an even more ambitious challenge than its predecessor. But some books are just ...
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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 Gentle Breeze in the Village (Tennen Kokekko)
Dir. Nobuhiro Yamashita. Japan , 2007. 121 min.Rarely has a title fit so perfectly the picture bearing it. Cute, corny and inoffensive, with just a pinch of salt to suggest the flavour of the old Yamashita, whose reputation lies mostly with tongue-in-cheek deadpan Jarmusch-like satires such as The Ramblers and ...
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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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Reviews
New York City Serenade
Dir. Frank Whaley. US 2007. 103 mins.The title of New York City Serenade and an opening aerial skyline shot would lead you to believe that the film is an ode to New York . It's really an ode to friendship with a friend who gets you to the wrong places ...
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Reviews
Cleaner
Dir: Renny Harlin US . 2007. 92 minsTen years have passed since the combination of Samuel L Jackson and director Renny Harlin was a guarantee of lively box-office action. Think The Long Kiss Good Night (1996) and Deep Blue Sea (1999). Harlin has steadily surrendered his A-list status and Jackson ...
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Reviews
The Last Lear
Dir. Rituparno Ghosh. India 2007. 130 min.An overly complicated film-within-a-film story, told through multiple narrators, causes confusion in Rituparno Ghosh's The Last Lear. The film was conceived as a vehicle for the greatest living idol of Indian cinema, Amitabh Bachchan, in his first full length English-language film. The role of ...
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Reviews
Dr. Plonk
Dir. Rolf de Heer. Australia 2007. 84 min.Deprived of the frantic mania and destructively anarchic passion that drove the best silent comedies, Rolf de Heer's attempt to revive the genre turns out into another capricious whimsy for a director whose erratic career has never followed a conventional path. Shot on ...
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Reviews
Just Like Home (Hjemve)
Dir Lone Scherfig Denmark . 2007. 97 minsFive years after her admired English-language debut Wilbur Wants To Kill Himself, writer-director Lone Scherfig makes an eagerly awaited return to her native Denmark for Just Like Home, an idiosyncratic ensemble comedy depicting a community in crisis. A slight, slow-burning tale, it lacks ...
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Reviews
Reservation Road
Dir: Terry George USA. 2007. 102 minsA respectable, well-intentioned exploration of grief, guilt and the instinct for revenge, Reservation Road boasts some fine performances but tries too hard to pass itself off as a weighty, tear-stained Oscar contender. A plot heavily reliant on coincidence may have worked on the page ...
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Reviews
Death Defying Acts
Dir: Gillian Armstrong UK/Australia. 2007. 97 mins.The period romance is back in style if the UK success of Atonement is anything to go by, but Death Defying Acts is so corny and old-fashioned that only diehard romantics are likely to consider it magical. The relationship between famed escapologist Harry Houdini ...
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Reviews
Married Life
Dir: Ira Sachs, US, 2007. 90minsIra Sachs's new film Married Life commences with wonderfully droll cartoon-like credits that simultaneously amuse with their archness and efficiently evoke the 1940s era in which the film is set. Like the film as a whole, however, they promise a great deal that is, alas, ...
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Reviews
Nothing is Private
Dir: Alan Ball. US. 2007. 124 mins.Perhaps the most polarizing film of the Toronto International Film Festival this week, Nothing Is Private marks the feature directorial debut of American Beauty writer and Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball. As you might expect from Ball's oeuvre to date, it is a ...
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Reviews
The Stone Angel
Dir. Kari Skogland Canada , 2007. 115 minutes.The Stone Angel is a perfectly respectable, solidly-made film which, beyond the expert performance by the always reliable Ellen Burstyn, has unfortunately little to recommend it for consideration for theatrical release beyond its home territory. Adapted by director Skogland from a beloved Canadian ...
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Reviews
The Past (O Passado)
Dir: Hector Babenco Argentina-Brazil 2007. 114 mins.Brazilian director Hector Babenco's latest film is an utterly misbegotten effort, a long way from his earlier successes such as Pixote and Kiss of the Spider Woman, or 2003's Carandiru. Despite the presence of international heart-throb Gael Garcia Bernal, the tortured, sometimes unwittingly laughable ...
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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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Reviews
Buddha Collapsed Out Of Shame (Buda As Sharm Foru Rikht)
Dir: Hana Makhmalbaf. Iran / France , 2007. 81 min. Hana Makhmalbaf is the younger scion of the Makhmalbaf Film House factory. All of eighteen years old and already a veteran with a short film, a documentary and a book of poems to her credit, she handles this first feature ...