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All articles by Lee Marshall – Page 39
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Reviews
The Guard Post
Dir. Kong Su-chang. South Korea . 2008. 122 mins.Like Park Chan-wook's Joint Security Area (2000), The Guard Post is set on the edge of the demilitarized zone that separates the two Koreas. Also like JSA, it uses an investigation into an incident involving a group of army recruits as an ...
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Reviews
An Empress And The Warriors
Dir. Tony Ching. Hong Kong/China. 2008. 93 mins.Celebrated action choreographer Tony Ching's latest and most ambitious directorial outing is a case study in the dangers of setting out deliberately to make a martial arts epic with wide territorial outreach and broad audience appeal. A light yarn about a female ruler's ...
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Reviews
L: Change The World
Dir: Hideo Nakata. Japan . 2008. 130 mins.A strong whiff of the well-milked cash cow hangs around this pedestrian follow-up to the hugely popular Death Note films - live-action versions of Takeshi Obata's bestselling manga. Though Goths the world over will rejoice at the top billing given here to cool, ...
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News
The critical view: the art of the film ending
Those of you who have been living in a forest hut for the last year and haven't got around to seeing the Coen brothers' No Country For Old Men should stop reading here.This week my subject is film endings - in particular the frustratingly brilliant climax to their adaptation of ...
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Reviews
The Chicken, The Fish And The King Crab ((El Pollo, El Pez Y El Cangrejo Real))
Dir: Jose Luis Lopez-Linares. Spain. 2008. 87mins.Jose Luis Lopez-Linares'nuanced documentary is at once an enjoyable satire on the modern cult of the top-flight chef and a telling human story about shattered illusions and personal growth. Following its late slot at the Berlinale - where the film managed to lift and ...
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News
Critical Mass: Lee Marshall looks at disappearing critics
The trend is undeniable: US newspapers and weekly magazines have shed around 30 film critics over the last two years, either by sacking them outright or by forcing them into early retirement. Some - such as veteran David Ansen at Newsweek - are likely to be replaced; but many more, ...
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News
Critical opinion: The industry should take a fresh look at film theory
To many ordinary film-goers, film critics are like sexologists: they spoil an enjoyable activity by talking about it too much. Film critics and sexologists argue their job is to help people enjoy that activity more - by realising what they're doing wrong and avoiding the positions that don't work or ...
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News
The critical view - Riding microtrends
Mark J Penn is the polling analyst famous for helping Bill Clinton to re-election in 1996 by identifying 'soccer moms' - busy, smart suburban women - as a crucial, overlooked sector of the electorate.Dubbed 'the guru of small things' by The New York Times, Penn has built a career on ...
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Reviews
Before The Fall (3 Dias)
Dir: Francisco Javier Gutierrez. Spain 2008. 93 mins.The buzz surrounding this Spanish sci-fi thriller at Berlin was fuelled by both the co-production involvement of Antonio Banderas and the news that Euro genre giant Filmax had picked up international rights. It's difficult to see what all the fuss is about: for ...
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News
Critical Mass- Best of the fests
Halfway through what is likely to be viewed as a non-vintage, drink-as-soon-as-possible Berlinale, I've been pondering the question of how to rate a film festival in critical terms.After all, anyone's view is influenced by the films they happened to catch there, whether they satisfied their cravings (cutting-edge Asian, Euro auteurs, ...
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Reviews
Another Love Story (Mare, Nossa Historia de Amor)
Dir: Lucia Murat. Brazil/France/Uruguay. 2008. 105 mins.'It's the West Side Story of the Brazilian favelas'. Indeed - but for all the energy, goodwill and rhythmic drive of this colourful teen musical, what sounds great on the poster is less convincing on the screen. Though some of the dance sequences are ...
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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 ...