All articles by David D'Arcy – Page 20
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Reviews
Live!
Dir: Bill Guttentag. US. 2007. 96mins.Bill Guttentag's hilarious satire of reality/game show media culture, Live! takes its subject to the wall with a live televised Russian Roulette competition. Presented as a The Making Of story, Live! also attacks the ghoulish opportunism of independent documentaries. Live! will show viewers of ...
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Reviews
Smiley Face
Dir: Gregg Araki. US. 2007. 87mins.Smiley Face opens as a would-be LA actress's pot-induced journey stumbles to an end, with blonde stoner Jane (Anna Faris) reflecting on the binge that, as the omniscient narrator (Roscoe Lee Browne) puts it, took a young woman 'from point A to point Z.' The ...
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Reviews
The Power Of The Game
Dir: Michael Apted. 2007. UK. 70mins. Michael Apted's new documentary, The Power Of The Game, is a film with a thesis: how football creates a global bond among countries. It also serves as an illuminating reflection of internal tensions within each country that plays the sport, even the United States. ...
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Reviews
The Cake Eaters
Dir: Mary Stuart Masterson. 2007. US. 95mins. Mary Masterson's directorial debut, The Cake Eaters, is a drama in a rainy small town about two families coming to terms with death and misfortune, counterpointed with a young couple tasting love for the first time. With a protagonist suffering from a degenerative ...
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Reviews
The Gates
Dirs: Albert Maysles, Antonio Ferrera. US. 2007. 100mins. The Gates takes its name from the 2005 project in which the artists Christo and Jean-Claude lined the paths of Central Park in Manhattan with orange portals draped with orange fabric. The event, which drew thousands of tourists to the park in ...
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Reviews
Nobel Son
Dir: Randall Miller. US. 2007. 107mins.A twist on the father-son conflict, and on the hostage drama, Nobel Son brings gore and some surprising humour to the dysfunctional family potboiler as it skewers academic propriety. The gag-filled comedy, which flaunts its quirkiness and improbable situations, could draw on the audience for ...
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Reviews
Taxi To The Dark Side
Dir. Alex Gibney. US. 108mins.Taxi To The Dark Side is a troubling look into torture practiced by the US military, beginning with the beating and murder in December 2003 of an Afghan taxi driver in the wrong place at the wrong time, and ending with a probe into how torture ...
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Reviews
Dark Matter
Dir. Chen Shi-Zheng. 2007. US. 88mins Dark Matter follows a promising Chinese science student as he falls short of his expectations while studying in the United States and spirals into depression as he fears disappointing the parents who sacrificed everything to send their son to an American university. The talented ...
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Reviews
Madonnas
Dir/scr Maria Speth. 2007. Ger. 100mins. There's nothing beatific or saintly about motherhood in Maria Speth's minimalist new feature, Madonnas. Rita, the mother of five children by at least three fathers, gets out of jail and makes a reluctant effort to live with the kids that she has brought into ...
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Reviews
Alice's House
Dir. Chico Teixeira. Braz. 2007. 90mins. Alice's House , documentarian Chico Teixeira's first fictional feature, is a look inside a middle-class family in Sao Paolo seen largely through the eyes of Alice, a frustrated fortyish manicurist. Teixeira shows us infidelity, love affairs, sibling rivalry and ageing through a cold lens ...
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Reviews
Poor Boy's Game
Dir: Clement Virgo. Can. 2007. 104mins. If you haven't had your fill of motivational boxing movies, here's one with a twist. Clement Virgo's Poor Boy's Game is a Canadian fight feature. In Nova Scotia, an ex-con enters the ring to pay a moral debt and escape the dead-end of Halifax's ...
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Reviews
Bordertown
Dir/scr: Gregory Nava. US. 2007. 112mins.In Bordertown, directed by Gregory Nava, Jennifer Lopez plays a Chicago reporter who speaks no Spanish, but goes undercover as a Mexican worker in a Juarez sweatshop to investigate the brutal murders of hundreds of women. If you can believe this, you can believe much ...
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Reviews
The Walker
Dir. Paul Schrader, USA, 2007, English, 107 minutes, colour.Writer/director Paul Schrader has built The Walker around a gay man of style and superficiality (Woody Harrelson) who escorts rich Washington women to lunch and to the cultural events that their powerful husbands scorn. When a friend's lobbyist lover ends up dead, ...
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Reviews
When A Man Falls In The Forest
Dir. Ryan Eslinger, USA, English, 90 minutes, colour.When a Man Falls In The Forest stars Sharon Stone and Timothy Hutton as middle-aged victims of monotony in their marriage and their work. Yet the real victim of monotony in Ryan Eslinger's second feature is the audience. The dull drama, developed at ...
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Reviews
The Home Song Stories
Dir. Tony Ayres, Australia, 2007, 103 min.,With immigration dominating the headlines in Australia as well as in Europe and the US, The Home Song Stories is a period film that gives a twist on current news - a lively melodrama about a roll-with-the-punches beauty whose long march through marriages and ...
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Reviews
The Tracey Fragments
Dir: Bruce McDonald. Canada. 2007. 80mins.Canadian Bruce McDonald has moved in a new direction, forsaking gonzo humour for multi-image experimentation in this first-person portrait of an angry persecuted teenager that lurches between tactile realism and fantasy. McDonald (Road Kill, Highway 61, Hard Core Logo) will move beyond his core of ...
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Reviews
Tuya's Marriage (Tu Ya De Hun Shi)
Dir: Wang Quan'an. China. 2007. 92mins.Tuya's Marriage is a clever and witty tale of a practical woman searching for a reliable man in a remote part of China in the throes of growing pains. Director and co-writer Wang Quan'an reminds us in his third feature that this quest is as ...
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Reviews
Chapter 27
Dir/Writer: Jarrett Schaefer. 100 minutes. US.Pointless and confusingly acted by a purposely hefty Jared Leto, this self-indulgent portrait of an insane Mark David Chapman in the three days before he assassinated John Lennon lacks insight or drama. Lindsay Lohan's supporting role as an excitable Lennon fan who befriends Chapman is ...
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Reviews
Interview
Dir: Steve Buscemi. US. 2007. 86 mins.Interview, Steve Buscemi's American adaptation of the 2003 Theo van Gogh film of the same name, offers a polished but tamer version of the original, coming at its subject without van Gogh's rough raunchy edges. Yet the performances, especially Sienna Miller's, are an asset ...
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Reviews
Snow Angels
Dir. David Gordon Green. US. 2007. 106mins. Snow Angels takes director David Gordon Green out of the American South, and it takes his film-making away from atmospheric meditation and into dense storytelling. His wintry small-town tale, adapted by Green from Stewart O'Nan's 1994 novel, examines a warm teenage relationship that ...