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All articles by Lee Marshall – Page 42
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Reviews
12 (Razgnevannyh Muzhchin)
Dir: Nikita Mikhalkov Russia 2007. 158 mins.Russian maestro Nikita Mikhalkov proves that Sidney Lumet's classic jury drama 12 Angry Men can work in another time and another place in this tasty adaptation, which is tough and passionate enough to survive the occasional lapse into Slavic sentimentality. It's hard to believe ...
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News
Critical Mass - the sci fi and Westerns debate
Sci-fi films are as 'dead as Westerns', according to Ridley Scott. He recently informed us of the future genre's demise while in Venice to present the 'definitive' director's cut of Blade Runner, which he began working on in 2000. One senses a certain desire for closure.Of course, Sir Ridley's obituary ...
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Reviews
The Secret Of The Grain (La Graine Et Le Mulet)
Dir/Scr: Abdellatif Kechiche , France , 2007, 153mins.A cine-verite tour-de-force, Abdellatif Kechiche's follow-up to the award- winning L'Esquive loads an apparently slight story set against the background of France 's first-and-second generation Maghrebi immigrant communities with surprising dramatic weight. There's even less story and even more of the director's trademark ...
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Reviews
The Hunting Party
Dir: Richard Shepard USA 2007. 100mins A textbook study in the dangers of trying to have one's cake and eat it, The Hunting Party mixes earnest sentimentality and black comedy in an unlikely yarn about the search for a Bosnian Serb war criminal by a maverick TV news crew. On ...
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Reviews
Far North
Dir: Asif Kapadia France/UK. 89 mins.With this dark tale of a supernaturally-tinged love triangle dark set in the frozen wastes of the Arctic Circle, Asif Kapadia returns to the myth-rooted dreamscape of his 2001 debut, The Warrior, after an uninspiring studio hiatus (Rogue/Focus Features' horror-flop The Return). But as a ...
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Reviews
The Darjeeling Limited
Dir: Wes Anderson USA 2007. 91 mins.Wes Anderson treads water, or maybe lime tea, with The Darjeeling Limited, the latest quirky philosophical comedy from the US maverick. This tale of three brothers who meet up on an Indian train to bond and find themselves has a kooky, laid back charm ...
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Reviews
Fallen Heroes (Nessuna qualità agli eroi)
Dir: Paolo Franchi It/Switz. 2007. 100 mins.Paolo Franchi is the true heir to Antonioni among the current crop of young Italian directors: he's fascinated by passive, blocked, brooding characters, by emotions that can hardly be translated into images, let alone words. And like the films of the late lamented Ferrarese ...
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Reviews
The Assassination Of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford
Dir: Andrew Dominik. USA 2007. 159 mins.Stirring, nuanced and elegaic, Andrew Dominik's retelling of Jesse James's legend is equal parts a mentor-acolyte love story, a melancholy neo-Western and a tragedy of betrayal with Biblical echoes. Based on the historical novel by Ron Hansen, the film touches on the way history ...
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Reviews
The Darjeeling Limited
Dir: Wes Anderson USA 2007. 91 mins.Wes Anderson treads water, or maybe lime tea, with The Darjeeling Limited, the latest quirky philosophical comedy from the US maverick. This tale of three brothers who meet up on an Indian train to bond and find themselves has a kooky, laid back charm ...
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News
Editorial opinion: rise of the machines
The increasing use of CG and green screen shows it ain't what you've got, but how you use it, says Lee Marshall.In one of this autumn's most hotly anticipated releases - Robert Zemeckis' adaptation of the Old English epic poem Beowulf - Angelina Jolie plays a sexy seductress who attempts ...
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News
Critical opinion: oeuvre and out
The financial backing that allowed Antonioni and Bergman to create such distinctive bodies of work is absent for today's young, says Lee MarshallMuch has already been written about the same-day demise of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni - not least that it's probably the most prominent Grim Reaper double whammy ...
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News
Editorial opinion: chasing the tale
Story doesn't get the credit it deserves in most contemporary discussions of cinema. Or, come to it, in the industry's own categories of merit.It wasn't always so: between 1940 and 1956, a best story Oscar ran alongside that for best original screenplay; then, in 1957, it was quietly retired, and ...
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Reviews
Kings
Dir: Tom Collins. Ire-UK. 91mins.A melancholy drama of Irish displacement, Kings has 'based on a stage play' written all over it. Not only in a negative sense: this study of the unfulfilled hopes, dreams and promises of five friends who moved to London from the west of Ireland years before ...
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Reviews
Kremen
Dir: Aleksei Mizgiryov. Russ. 2007. 83mins.Perhaps the Taormina festival catalogue errs a little on the side of enthusiasm in comparing Aleksei Mizgiryov's debut feature Kremen to Taxi Driver. But there is something in the claim: like Scorsese's classic, this is a tale of a disturbed, asocial innocent with a rigid ...
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Reviews
Man Of Glass (Uomo Di Vetro)
Dir: Stefano Incerti. It. 2007. 96mins.A worthy addition to the modern canon of Italian mafia films, Man Of Glass tells the true story of Leonardo Vitale, the first Sicilian mafioso to turn state's evidence and reveal the inner workings of the powerful Palermo branch of Cosa Nostra. Like The Hundred ...
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News
Critical opinion: the people's choice
When critics bemoan the state of Hollywood movies, they are also implicitly - and unfairly - criticising the film-going public who flock to see them, says Lee MarshallThe back-to-back releases of Spider-Man 3, Shrek The Third and Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End have generated a spate of op-eds ...
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Reviews
Inside (A l'Interieur)
Dirs: Julien Maury, Alexandre Bustillo. Fr. 2007. 80mins.Imagine a graphic, feature-length riff on that line in Macbeth about Macduff being 'from his mother's womb untimely ripped' and you have the kernel of Inside, a vicious gore-fest, which seems designed to prove that Europeans too can up the horror stakes too ...
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News
Critical view: breaking the rules
Romania's cash-poor but ideas-rich film industry is proving that necessity is the mother of invention with a string of influential titles. What's the secret formula, asks Lee MarshallWhat is it about those Romanians' The Eastern European country's cash-strapped film industry manages to squeeze out no more than 10 full-length features ...