All articles by Lee Marshall – Page 43
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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 ...
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Reviews
Confession Of Pain (Seung sing)
Dirs: Andrew Lau, Alan Mak. HK. 2006. 116mins. The Infernal Affairs trilogy - and Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning remake, The Departed - turned Andrew Lau and Alan Mak into the golden boys of Hong Kong cinema. The directing duo followed up with the enjoyably lightweight teen racer yarn Initial D, which ...
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Reviews
Spider Lilies (Ci-Qing)
Dir/scr: Zero Chou. Tai. 2007. 97mins. Tempering the transgressive spirit of Almodovar with the innocent fantasies of Taiwanese teen melodrama, the girl-on-girl romance Spider Lilies is a watchable but rather lightweight follow-up to Zero Chou's well-received 2004 debut Splendid Float.With its casting of Taiwanese pop icon and TV personality Rainie ...
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Reviews
Itty Bitty Titty Committee
Dir: Jamie Babbit. US. 2007. 85mins. Naive and over-didactic, but still brimming with infectious energy and a sense of mission that's hard to hate, Jamie Babbit's third feature serves up radical lesbian feminism in teen-movie sauce. Actually, teens are generally more mature than this; Itty Bitty Titty Committee is like ...
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Reviews
Saturno Contro
Dir: Ferzan Ozpetek. It-Fr-Turk. 2007. 109mins. The problems of nine little people don't amount to a hill of beans in Italo-Turkish director Ferzan Ozpetek's latest offering, Saturno Contro. Billed as a melancholy generational comedy, this occasionally affecting - but dramatically inert - feature deals with a close-knit circle of thirty- ...
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Features
In focus - Critical round-up - Potsdamer clamour
This may prove to have been the biggest Berlinale ever - in everything but film quality. The patchy selection of films in competition failed to ride the wave of success, and left critics muttering that the Berlinale would do better to refocus on its core business.True, there was a last-minute ...
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Reviews
Shelter (Riparo: Anis Fra Di Noi)
Dir: Marco Simon Puccioni. It-Fr. 2007. 105mins. A small, unpolished but involving drama of jealousy and social status, Shelter offers an interesting twist on the theme of the stranger who enters a family unit and exposes its faultlines. The unit in this case is a lesbian couple, and the stranger ...
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Reviews
Tekkonkinkreet
Dir: Michael Arias. Jap. 2007. 112mins. The first feature-length Japanese anime to be directed by a foreigner, the impressive Tekkonkinkreet has cult animation written all over it. It's a streetwise Spirited Away, darker, moodier and more adult-oriented than Miyazaki's masterwork, with an apocalyptic undercurrent that reminds one of the dark ...
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Reviews
Here's Looking At You, Boy
Dir/scr: Andre Schafer. Ger-Neth. 2007. 90mins. Billed as a documentary about 'the coming-out of queer cinema', and destined mostly for TV and DVD formats after further festival action, Here's Looking At You, Boy ticks most of the right boxes in its interviews-plus-film clips survey of the years when queer cinema ...
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Reviews
The Last Mimzy
Dir: Bob Shaye. US. 2007. 94mins. What on paper looked suspiciously like a vanity directing project by New Line supremo Bob Shaye turns out to be a quirky, New Age, eco-aware kids' sci-fi movie that plays well with young audiences - at least if the upbeat reaction from the Berlinale ...
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Reviews
I Served The King Of England (Obsluhoval Jsem Anglickeho Krale)
Dir: Jiri Menzel. Czech Rep-Slovak. 2007. 119mins. A likeable comic underdog saga that follows the life and loves of a Chaplinesque waiter in pre- and post-war Czechoslovakia, I Served the King of England represents veteran Czech director Jiri Menzel's most marketable feature for some time. The film's little-big-man protagonist and ...
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Reviews
2 Days In Paris
Dir: Julie Delpy. France/Germany 2006. 96 mins.Yes, it's another film in which Julie Delpy walks around Paris with an American guy talking about relationships. But despite the surface similarities, the French actress-singer-scriptwriter's first commercial film as director (she herself has described her first feature, the no-budget Looking For Jimmy, as ...
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Reviews
The Other (El Otro)
Dir: Ariel Rotter. Argentina/France/Germany. 84 mins.A city lawyer's mid-life crisis becomes an existential odyssey in Ariel Rotter's second feature. Politely received at its Berlinale press showing, this competition entry is intriguing and thought-provoking without ever being truly involving. There is much to admire in the formal devices that the film ...