All articles by David D'Arcy – Page 17
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Reviews
Journey To The Centre of the Earth 3-D (2008)
Dir. Eric Brevig, 2008, US, 92 minutesEffects whiz Eric Brevig (Total Recall, Pearl Harbour) makes his feature debut with this 3-D take on Jules Verne's classic 1864 novel; the result targets children (particularly boys) and their parents. In fact, the 3-D novelty could prove to be more of a draw ...
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Reviews
The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Dir: Andrew Adamson. 2008. UK/US. 144mins.The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian takes the youthful characters of its predecessor, The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, and throws them into a breathtaking landscape, where they battle for power with a new cast of villains. If crossbows, strange creatures, and a squeaky-clean ...
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Reviews
Finding Amanda
Dir/scr. Peter Tolan, US, 2008, 100 minutesIn Finding Amanda , a compulsive gambler who is also a recovering drunk sets out for Las Vegas to find his hooker niece and take her to rehab in Malibu . It's a comedy suicide mission, a Saving Prostitute Ryan which offers up some ...
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Reviews
The Caller
Dir. Richard Ledes, 2008, US, minutes.The Caller is an unusual hybrid, a thriller about corporate corruption that is also a Holocaust memoir. A man facing the certainty of murder looks back sixty years to his survival of the Nazi occupation of France. But the result is also a hybrid, a ...
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Reviews
Lake City
Dirs. Perry Moore/Hunter Hill, 2008, US, 92 minutes .Lake City sets its earnest prodigal son story in a small southern town. When black sheep Billy (Garity) comes home with a young boy to his mother, Maggie (Spacek), a violent drug war follows him. Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe may have written ...
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Reviews
Trucker
Dir/scr. James Mottern, US, 2008, 90 minutesThe trucker in Trucker is a woman: Diane Ford (Monaghan). forced to take in her young son when her ex-husband Len (Bratt) is stricken with cancer. The 11-year-old whom she hasn't seen since he was a baby proves harder to handle than the 18-wheeler ...
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Reviews
Love Pain And Vice Versa (Sexo, Dolor Y Vice Versa)
Dir. Alfonso Pineda-Ulloa, Mexico, 2008, 86 minutesAlfonso Pineda-Ulloa's thriller is a stylish feature debut that infuses Alfred Hitchcock's influence into every frame of a story about mutual obsession. Love, Pain & Vice Versa may not rock the box office - although it seems to have potential for modest success - ...
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Reviews
Paraiso Travel
Dir. Simon Brand, Colombia, 2008, 116 minutes.Paraiso Travel takes on the much-travelled (and, recently, much-filmed) journey from Colombia to the dubious paradise of New York where immigrants perform gruelling jobs and live in squalid illegal dwellings. Other films have trod this path with far more drama and imagination.Director Simon Brand's ...
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Reviews
Pathology
Dir. Marc Schoelermann, US, 2008, 93 minutesPathology is a cut-em-up thriller that follows a young physician into a snarl of medical residents who make sure that they always have a steady supply of freshly-killed bodies to examine, no matter what it takes. If your taste runs to sawed-open chests and ...
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ReviewsThe Children Of Huang Shi
Dir. Roger Spottiswoode, 2008, China/Australia/Germany, 125 minutes.The Children of Huang Shi is the epic tale of a journalist seeking adventure who leads an orphanage of Chinese boys to safety from Japanese invaders in the late 1930’s. Yet the real test of endurance is on the shoulders of an audience challenged ...
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Reviews
Sleepwalking
Dir. William Maher, 2008, US, 101 minutes, colour.In Sleepwalking, an 11-year-old girl is abandoned by her mother and left with her undependable uncle, who shows the child just how dysfunctional their family can be. William Maher (not the talk show host) has made a dark film, shot in dark hues, ...
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Reviews
Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day
Dir. Bharat Nalluri, UK, 2008, 92 minutes.Set in lavishly-decadent pre-war London, Miss Pettigrew Lives For A Day is a grown-up Cinderella story about a middle-aged jobless governess who schemes to be social secretary to an American Lolita, who, in turn, schemes to be a singer. Bharat Nalluri's unimaginative, awkwardly-scripted farcereminds ...
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Reviews
Standard Operating Procedure
Dir. Errol Morris, USA, 2008, 117minsWhatever the future brings in Iraq, the US role there will always be remembered for the abuse of prisoners documented in the photographs taken by American guards in 2003 at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad. Errol Morris's cold Standard Operating Procedure scrutinizes the pictures and ...
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Reviews
Cherry Blossoms (Kirschblüten - Hanami)
Dir: Doris Dorrie, Germany, 2008, 127minsDoris Dorrie's bittersweet film is a story of mourning and the futility of trying to recover something lost. A Bavarian husband who is nearing retirement loses his wife suddenly, and flies to Japan to visit sites that she never had a chance to see while ...
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Reviews
Love And Other Crimes (Liebe und andere Verbrechen)
Dir. Stefan Arsenijevic, Ger/Serb/Aust/Slovenia 2008, 105minsIn Love and Other Crimes, Anica (Dobra) is a woman approaching middle age who decides to leave her dreary high-rise Belgrade suburb with the money that she plans to steal from a solarium run by an older mobster (Stojanovic) who is her boss and lover. ...
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Reviews
The Spiderwick Chronicles
Dir: Mark Waters, 2008, USIn The Spiderwick Chronicles the Grace family find trouble when they move into their creaky New England home - and it isn't trouble with the mortgage. The house smells strange and creatures are heard moving behind the walls.Mark Waters's film is the adaptation of the popular ...
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Reviews
Pretty Bird
Dir: Paul Schneider, US, 2008, 97mins.The perennial story of Americans trying to get rich quick on a new invention meets the perennial story of Americans betraying each other over property in Pretty Bird. The look, and feel, of the film sing an ode to American kitsch.Pretty Bird's success in the ...
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Reviews
Anywhere USA
Dir. Chusy Haney-Jardine, USA, 2008, 124minsThe portentously titled Anywhere USA is a triptych of Americana by debut writer/director Chusy Haney-Jardine - a trailer-trash farce, an uncle/niece meditation on the death of parents, and a clumsy satire on racial anxiety among the rich and White.Haney-Jardine, who says the film draws on ...