All articles by Dan Fainaru – Page 29
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Reviews
Chouga
Dir. Darezhan Omirbaev. Kazakhstan / France, 2007. 88 Min.Darezhan Omirbayev's minimalist film takes Tolstoy's Anna Karenina from St. Petersburg and Moscow to Almaty and Astana, and from 1877 to 2007. It is an adaptation that will surprise many by the economy of means applied to one of the most effusive ...
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Reviews
881
Dir. Royston Tan. Singapore / Japan, 2007. 105 min.Oozing sweet smiles and made-up grimaces, a myriad of glittering colours, low-brow humour and an endless string of easily hummed tunes, 881 is already a major hit in Singapore. Despite the lack of any plot to speak of, Royston Tan's film is ...
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Reviews
The Assembly (Ji Jie Hao)
Dir. Feng Xiaogang. China, 2007. 125 min. Feng Xiaogang's fiercely patriotic war picture, is set to become a blockbuster at home, offering China its own Private Ryan. But while the film standards may be technically impeccable, it could do with more story and characters to carry its audience through a ...
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Reviews
Flash Point (Aka City With No Mercy)
Dir. Wilson Yip. Hong Kong/China. 2007. 87 mins.Wilson Yip's new martial arts extravaganza is action-packed and honed along well-tested genre formulas, with an adrenalin-pumping soundtrack and a story that moves ahead with the speed and ruthlessness of a runaway train. It will leave its audience breathless after seeing so much ...
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Reviews
Glory To The Filmmaker (Kantoku Banzai)
Dir. Takeshi Kitano. Japan. 2007.Takeshi Kitano's last couple of films confirm that Japan 's maverick filmmaker is having a hard time deciding which way to go next and feels the urgent need to share it with his audience. After the jaundiced look at the film industry in general, and his ...
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Reviews
Gone with the Woman (Tatt av Kvinnen)
Dir. Peter Naess. Sweden/Norway 2007. 92 min.Picked by Norway to carry its flag at the Oscars this year, Peter Naess' new screwball romance takes off a vivacious, though rather misogynistic tone, but soon settles down to a pedestrian pace which it follows the rest of the way. Naess, whose irreverent ...
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Reviews
In the City of Sylvia (En la ciudad de Sylvia)
Dir. Jose Luis Guerin. Spain / France, 2007. 90 min.In the City of Sylvia is likely to be defined by some as 'a work of genius' and by others as like 'watching paint dry'. An audience in search of a plot with a beginning middle and end should look elsewhere. ...
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Reviews
The Obscure (Xiaoshuo)
Dir. Lu Yue. China 2006. 84 min.Potentiallya powerful soporific for any audience not fluent in Mandarin, Lu Yue's combination of documentary and improvised live action is almost self-defeating in its insistence to stick, for the first hour, to a purely theoretical seminar. As it is, Lu's picture could interest scholars ...
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News
The Band's Visit sweeps Israeli Film Academy awards
Following its triumphal march launched in Cannes, Eiran Kolirin's The Band's Visit completed its grand sweep, taking eight out of the 14 awards distributed by the Israeli Film Academy in its annual ceremony.Thefeature took awardsincluding best film, best director and best script for Kolirin, best actor (Sasson Gabai), best actress ...
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Reviews
Mad Detective
Dir. Johnny To, Wai Ka Fai. Hong Kong 2007. 89 min.The prolific Johnny To and his occasional collaborator Wai Ka Fai here put a new twist on the standard police yarn. No longer simply good cop versus bad cop, they add a third angle, the mad cop, who uses neither ...
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Reviews
Love Comes Lately
Dir. Jan Schutte. Germany/Austria/US 2007. 86 min.Jan Schutte's adaptation of three short-stories by the Yiddish writer and Nobel-prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer will attract mostly mature audiences who will identify with its central character, octogenarian writer Max Kohn. Like most adaptations of works by great authors, the picture faces the ...
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Reviews
Dainipponjin
Dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto. Japan, 2007.With similar credentials to those Takeshi Kitano had before he made movies, but determined to take a different approach for his debut, Hitoshi Matsumoto looks set to establish a reputation as a quirky, bizarre type of humourist. His first film should qualify with equal ease for ...
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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
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
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 ...
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Reviews
Useless (Wu Yong)
Dir. Jia Zhang-Ke. China , 2007. 84mins.Perennial Venice favourite Jia Zhang-Ke is back with a documentary whose title could invite all manner of cheap shots. But it also happens to be the name of a new, and highly successful, Chinese fashion brand. The second part in a trilogy dedicated to ...
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Reviews
Disengagement
Dir. Amos Gitai. France / Israel / Germany / Italy , 2007. 115 mins.Amos Gitai's systematic chronicle of modern Israeli history reaches one of its more sensitive and inevitable points in this dramatised version of the recent crisis generated by the unilateral decision, taken by the Sharon government, to dismantle ...
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Reviews
The Sun Also Rises (Taiyang zhaochang shengqi)
Dir. Jiang Wen. China , 2007. 116 min . Five years in preparation and three years in the making, Jiang Wen's explosively energetic third feature film is a feast for the eyes and a delight for the ears. But at the same time this may prove a perplexing, often infuriating ...
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Reviews
Help Me Eros (2007)
Dir. Lee Kang Sheng. Taiwan , 2007. 103minsBest known as Tsai Ming Liang's regular lead actor, Lee Kang Sheng's second feature film will cater mainly for the regular followers of Tsai's special brand of cinema - slow, minimalist, obsessive and heavily reliant on such compulsive fixations as sex and food, ...