All articles by Lee Marshall – Page 39
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Reviews
Sonetaula (2007)
Dir: Dir. Salvatore Mereu. Italy/France/Belgium.2008. mins Sonetaula, Sicilian director Salvatore Mereu's remarkable second feature, follows, in measured scenes of great formal beauty, a young Sardinian man's tragic arc from his adolescence in the late 1930s as a mountain shepherd to his life on the run as a bandit and fugitive. ...
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Reviews
The Path (El Camino)
Dir: Ishtar Yasin Gutierrez. Costa Rica/Nicaragua/France. 2008. 91 mins. The road trip of two desperately poor Nicaraguan kids in search of their absent mother becomes an other-worldly journey with echoes of The Night Of The Hunter in Costa Rican director Ishtar Yasin's impressive debut, which screened in the Forum. ...
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Reviews
Sparrow (Man Jeuk)
Dir: Johnnie To. Hong Kong. 2008. 87 mins.The spirit of Jacques Demy lives on in Hong Kong in prolific genre auteur Johnnie To's latest offering. Some of the scenes in this gentle romantic pickpocketing yarn are pure cinematic pleasure, but in the end the plot and the characters are too ...
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Reviews
Cafe De Los Maestros
Dir: Miguel Kohan. Argentina/USA/Brazil. 2008. 92 mins.You can imagine the pitch: 'It's the Buena Vista Social Club of tango'. (Old-school tango, that is - before Nuevo Tango genius Astor Piazzola began to take the music in a more radical direction). And it really is: there's the gathering of the old ...
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Reviews
Elegy
Dir: Isabel Coixet. US. 2008. 108 mins.After a couple of near misses, Isabel Coixet finally learns that less is more with Elegy. Her latest feature is an impressively-controlled melodrama that strips back Philip Roth's unsentimental 2001 novel of ageing male desire, The Dying Animal, and repackages it as a straight ...
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Reviews
Lake Tahoe
Dir: Fernando Eimbcke. Mexico. 2008. 81 mins .At first, Mexican director Fernando Eimbcke's second film appears to be another droll, quirky movie about teenagers which remind us that sometimes, when nothing happens, everything happens. Rather like his debut, Duck Season, which garnered festival action, critical plaudits and theatrical release in ...
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ReviewsBlack Ice (Musta Jaa)
Dir: Petri Kotwica. Finland/Germany. 2008. 100 mins.Petri Kotwica’s darkly inventive second film,Black Ice, tries to be at one and the same time a Hitchcockian thriller, a horror version of a Feydeau farce, and an intense marriage drama of love, betrayal and jealousy in the tradition of ...
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Reviews
CSNY: Deja Vu
Dir: Bernard Shakey. US. 2008. 97 mins.'The huddled sixtysomethings look like they're comparing prescriptions on stage' wrote one uncharitable US music critic of Crosby , Stills, Nash and Young's 2006 'Freedom of Speech' tour, which stirred controversy with its outspoken anti-Iraq-war stance. Unless you're a diehard ...
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Reviews
Quiet Chaos (Caos Calmo)
Dir: Antonello Grimaldi. Italy. 2008. 110 mins.'Write about what you know' goes the old dictum - so contemporary Italian scripters mostly write about city-dwelling, media-savvy middle-class people like themselves. But at least in Quiet Chaos our hero, TV executive Pietro Paladini, is doing something more original than having a mid-life ...
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Reviews
Shine A Light
Dir: Martin Scorsese. US. 2008. 123 mins.Raunchy and affectionate, Scorsese's Rolling Stones film, which opened this year's Berlinale, is as much homage as concert film. In bringing the miracle of the Stones' survival to a wider audience, it's the cinematic equivalent of an all-singing, all-dancing Tutankhamun exhibition. And for all ...
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News
Berlin - the critic's preview
The final Competition line-up of the 58th Berlinale confirms the German festival's preference for indie kudos over commercial clout and star power.Once again - and in contrast to last year's Cannes and Venice festivals - few of the US entries are likely to tickle the critics.The one exception looks to ...
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News
Critical mass- Foreign affairs
The US film industry desperately needs the rest of the world. International takings now account for around half of the theatrical revenue of the US majors, and substantially more for most US indie producers or studio specialty divisions. As United Artists CEO Paula Wagner told Mipcom delegates last October, the ...
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News
Critical Mass- the art of the film trailers
Trailers have received scant attention from film critics; Lisa Kernan's peppy 2004 history of the genre, Coming Attractions, is one of the rare exceptions.This is probably because the trailer is not considered a 'pure' genre. Trailers exist for one reason only: to make us go see the film.But they differ ...
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Reviews
Those Three (An Seh)
Dir/Scr: Naghi Nemati. Iran, 2007. 77mins.Naghi Nemati's assured, poetic debut proves that the Iranian talent factory is still up and running. Playing in Dubai after its Locarno festival bow and Toronto slot, this austerely-shot existential odyssey about three soldiers lost in a snowy wasteland seems tailor-made to illustrate Fellini's claim ...
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Reviews
Recycle (Ee'adat Khalk)
Dir/Scr: Mahmoud al-Massad. Jordan/Netherlands/USA/Germany 2007. 80mins.Recycle, a portrait of a disillusioned former mujahideen fighter who makes a living collecting scrap cardboard in Zarqa, his Jordanian hometown, is one of those subtle, taciturn, underplayed documentaries that forces its audience to work at teasing out meanings. It's Errol Morris, in other words, ...
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Reviews
Loins of Punjab Presents
Dir: Manish Acharya India/USA 2007. 88mins.A mostly hilarious screwball comedy set around a New York talent contest for expat Indians - or 'desis' - Loins of Punjab Presents has an infectious energy that makes up for the occasional lapse into self-indulgent cliche. With its wacky ensemble cast and its affectionately ...
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Reviews
Captain Abu Raed
Dir/Scr: Amin Matalqa. Jordan/USA 2007. 109mins.Only a handful of full-length films have come out of Jordan in the fifty years since the country's first feature, Struggle in Jarash. This makes Captain Abu Raed's commercial poise and polish all the more remarkable: a moving dramatic fable about an elderly airport janitor's ...
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Reviews
Whatever Lola Wants
Dir: Nabil Ayouch, France/Canada. 2007. 110 mins.French-produced, set between New York and Cairo, scored by an Indian-born French composer and directed by a Moroccan, Whatever Lola Wants practices the same enlightened multiculturalism that it so passionately preaches. But although Nabil Ayouch's mid-budget third feature has its heart in the right ...
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News
Dubai's top Muhr award goes to Lebanese drama Under the Bombs
Lebanese cine-verite drama Under the Bombs, and Soneaa Fi Masr (Made in Egypt), French director Karim Goury's first-person story of his search for his Egyptian biological father, picked up the Muhr Gold awards for best narrative feature and best documentary at this year's Dubai International Film Festival, which ran from ...