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All articles by Lee Marshall – Page 43
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Reviews
Calle Santa Fe
Dir: Carmen Castillo. Chile-Fr-Bel. 164mins.Beginning as a reconstruction of the October 1977 police shooting of Chilean underground Marxist leader Miguel Enriquez, Calle Santa Fe is a long but ultimately compelling documentary both celebrates the anti-Pinochet resistance and subjects it to testing questions. These are made all the more incisive and ...
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Reviews
Secret Sunshine (Miryang)
Dir: Lee Chang-dong. S Kor. 2007. 133mins.An uncompromising experiment in how much suffering a soul can take, both on screen and in one's cinema seat, Lee Chang-dong's follow-up to the critically-acclaimed Oasis makes for an original but ultimately gruelling two-and-a-quarter hours' viewing. This contemporary, twisted parable of Job is impressive, ...
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Reviews
The Mourning Forest (Mogari no Mori)
Dir: Naomi Kawase. Japan/France 2007. 98 mins.Naomi Kawase is one of those directors who usethe medium of film to work through their obssessions. In her case,these include fractured families, the aftermath of a loved one's deathor disappearance, rural Japanese traditions, the spiritual luminosityof the elderly and infirm. Luckily for audiences ...
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Reviews
Death Proof
Dir/scr: Quentin Tarantino. USA 2007. 115 mins. Quentin Tarantino should go back to making films that matter. If the shorter, Grindhouse version of Death Proof, his hybrid slasher meets car chase homage to early 1970s B-movies, hinted that everyone's favourite cult director was running out of creative gas, the full-length ...
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Reviews
Ploy
Dir/scr: Pen-ek Ratanaruang. Thai. 2007. 105 mins. Thai auteur Pen-ek Ratanaruang's most mature, measured film to date, Ploy offers a darkly poetic variation on the theme of The Seven Year Itch. Though its slow pacing demands a certain patience, the slow waltz of story, editing and camerawork goes beyond the ...
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Reviews
Paranoid Park
Dir/scr: Gus Van Sant. US-Fr. 2007. 85mins.Gus Van Sant is such a consummate filmmaker, so in love with the visual and aural texture of the medium, that it's difficult at first to pinpoint the niggling problem with Paranoid Park, his most experimental feature to date. It's not that Van Sant ...
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Reviews
All Is Forgiven (Tout est pardonnee)
Dir/scr: Mia Hansen-Love. France 2007. 105 mins.Debut director Mia Hansen-Love turns seemingly random slices from the life of a disintegrating family unit into a remarkably graceful, natural film about what it is to be human. Perhaps the most persuasive aspect of this hopeful parable of failure is the way casting, ...
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Reviews
Blind Mountain (Mang Shan)
Dir/scr/prod: Li Yang. Ch. 2007. 103 mins. Li Yang demonstrates once again that he is a master of cinematic tension with his second feature, Blind Mountain . Based on the widespread practice of bride trafficking in rural China, this harrowing but limpidly shot story of the abduction and sale of ...
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Reviews
The Milky Way (A Via Lacteal)
Dir: Lina Chamie Brazil 2007. 88 mins. A cross-city drive turns into an existential odyssey in Lina Chamie's The Milky Way, which opened Cannes ' Critics Week sidebar. Part urban road movie, part stream-of-consciousness cinematic monologue, Milky Way layers flashbacks, bon mots about life and death, and variant versions of ...
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Reviews
Sicko
Dir: Michael Moore. US. 2007. 123 mins. If it works, don't fix it. Michael Moore's passionate, bullying, gag-laced approach to the 'j'accuse' documentary worked a treat in Bowling for Columbine and Farenheit 9/11 - and it works even better in Sicko, his investigation of the US public healthcare system. Moore ...
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Reviews
Boarding Gate
Dir/scr: Oliver Assayas. Fr. 2007. 106mins. Maverick French director Oliver Assayas gets lost in transit with Boarding Gate, a transglobal thriller of dirty business deals and dirty sex that he has previously mined in Demonlover, with equally underwhelming results. Cannes ' out-of-competition 'Midnight Screening' is generally reserved for films that ...
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Reviews
Triangle (Tit Samgok)
Dirs: Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam, Johnnie To. HK-Chi. HK-Chi. 2007. 100mins.Not so much a portmanteau film as a cinematic relay race, Triangle sees three leading Hong Kong directors, each with their own team of scriptwiters, taking on three successive parts of a single thriller. Though it's a fascinating experiment, the ...
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Features
Comment - Discovering the actual new cinema
Imagine a world in which our knowledge of US cinema came exclusively from the films that play the major festivals. In this strange parallel universe directors such as Gus Van Sant, David Lynch and Harmony Korine would spring to mind at the free-association prompt "American movies!".They do not, of course ...
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News
Jury service: the acclaim game
What's it like to sit on the Competition jury at Cannes' Lee Marshall goes behind the scenes. When he was president of the Cannes jury in 1953 - a year marked by a row over Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages Of Fear, a political thriller accused of being 'anti-American' - Jean ...
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Reviews
The Matrimony (Xin Zhong You Gui)
Dir: Teng Huatao. Chi. 2007. 90mins.Produced by the brothers Wang - China's answer to the Weinsteins - and released in Mainland China on Valentine's Day, The Matrimony was just pipped to the post by Li Shaohong's The Door (which hit cinemas on 18 January) for the title of 'China's first ...
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Reviews
My Brother Is An Only Child (Mio Fratello E' Figlio Unico)
Dir: Daniele Luchetti. It-Fr. 2007. 108mins. The signature of screenwriting duo Rulli and Petraglia has become a sort of appelation controllee quality mark for recent Italian cinema products. They've even invented a sub-genre of films, which we might define 'retro-modern': period studies that repackage the tribes and the traumas of ...
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Reviews
One Hundred Nails (Centochiodi)
Dir/scr: Ermanno Olmi. It. 2007. 92mins. Veteran Italian filmmaker Ermanno Olmi is a devout Catholic, and his work has long had a spiritual agenda. But even in such obvious parables as The Legend Of The Holy Drinker (which won a Golden Lion in Venice in 1988), the message is generally ...
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Reviews
The Lark Farm (La Masseria Delle Allodole)
Dirs: Paolo Taviani, Vittorio Taviani. It-Bul-Sp-Fr. 2007. 117mins. It's a shame that the first straight historical feature to deal with the Armenian genocide of 1915 is such a poor film. The theme (already dealt with in several documentaries and Atom Egoyan's tricksy Ararat) deserves a better platform than this melodrama ...