All articles by Sheila Johnston – Page 5
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Reviews
Taxi Para Tres (A Cab For Three)
Dir: Orlando Lubbert. Chile. 2001. 90 mins. The unexpected winner of the Golden Shell for best film in San Sebastian, A Cab For Three (Taxi Para Tres), a black comedy about a taxi driver drawn into a life of crime, continues the festival's current preference for South and Central American ...
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Reviews
Birthday Girl
Dir: Jez Butterworth. UK-US. 2001. 85mins. After an unusually long time in the works, Birthday Girl emerges as a likeable and competent small-scale divertissement which represents a considerable advance on Mojo, writer-director Jez Butterworth's poorly received debut film adapted from his own stage play. Birthday Girl is notable above all ...
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Reviews
The Martins
Dir: Tony Grounds. UK. 2001. 84 mins. Tiger Aspect, a company which aims to foster television talent and has a short but successful track record in translating TV-generated projects to the big screen (Bean, Kevin And Perry Go Large), will be hard-pressed to tempt film-goers to this limp comedy. The ...
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Reviews
How Harry Became A Tree
Dir: Goran Paskaljevic. Ireland/ Italy/ UK/ France. 2001. 100 mins. The main trouble with Harry is its peculiar cocktail of ingredients. Based on a Chinese short story, scripted in first Serbian, then French and eventually English, directed by a Serb, Goran Paskaljevic, produced by an Irish-Italian-French-British team and set in ...
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Reviews
Y Tu Mama Tambien (And Your Mother Too)
Dir: Alfonso Cuaron. Mexico. 2001. 105 mins. After working successfully for a decade in the US, Alfonso Cuaron returns briefly to his homeland, abandoning the highly crafted look of his two Hollywood studio features, A Little Princess and Great Expectations, to make a vibrant, gritty road movie which is also ...
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News
Time Out (L'Emploi Du Temps)
Dir: Laurent Cantet. France. 2001. 133 mins. Laurent Cantet delivers brilliantly on the promise of his outstanding 1999 feature debut Human Resources with another compelling look at an individual caught up in trouble at the workplace. L'Emploi Du Temps is based on the true case of a middle manager who ...
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Reviews
Me Without You
Dir: Sandra Goldbacher. UK. 2001. 107 mins. Sandra Goldbacher's follow-up to The Governess is a another female-centred period piece, although of a very different kind. A bittersweet comedy tracing a tempestuous friendship over 30 years, it's shrewdly observed and beautifully mounted, but suffers from an unevenness of tone and a ...
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Reviews
The Fast Runner
Dir: Zacharias Kunuk. Canada. 2000. 167 mins. Of all the esoterica on show in Cannes this year, The Fast Runner, a nearly three-hour epic in Inuit (it claims to be the first feature ever written in this language) based on a 1000 year old Eskimo legend, must take ...
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Reviews
High Heels And Low Lifes
Dir: Mel Smith. UK. 2001. 86 mins. The film's title implies a commercially canny mix of grrrl power and gangsters, but Mel Smith's first directorial outing since Bean (1997) is unlikely to replicate its success, or that of writer Kim Fuller's last film, SpiceWorld (1996). Here, males will be turned ...
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Reviews
Lovely Rita
Dir: Jessica Hausner. Austria. 2001. 79 mins.After her noted short Flora (1996) and medium-length film Inter-View (1999), Hausner makes a highly impressive feature debut with this tragi-comic portrait of a withdrawn teenager. Shot on DV with amateur actors, the project's small-scale and offbeat nature will limit its ...
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Reviews
Martha... Martha
Dir: Sandrine Veysset. France. 2001. 97 mins.Martha... Martha resumes many of the themes of Sandrine Veysset's previous work, in particular her first feature, Will It Snow At Christmas': deeply damaged families living on the poverty line, a mother with suicidal tendencies and, more generally, the pervasive undercurrent of emotional violence ...
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Reviews
Trouble Every Day
Dir: Claire Denis. France. 2000. 99 mins. Claire Denis tiptoes perilously close to Golden Turkey land with this ponderous study of insatiable desire and twisted eroticism, which will command initial interest from buffs on the strength of its director's previously impressive track record (Chocolat, I Can't Sleep, Beau Travail) ...
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News
ROBERTO SUCCO
Dir: Cedric Kahn. France. 2001. 124 mins. An immensely detailed study of a notorious mass murderer and his hunters, Roberto Succo is an impressive but subdued piece of work which, despite an extraordinary central performance, never delivers on the director's promise to slip the audience inside the mind of a ...
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Reviews
Pau And His Brother
Dir: Marc Recha. Spain/ France. 2000. 110 mins. Marc Recha's third feature starts from the principle of focussing on tiny moods and moments rather than grand dramatic set-pieces and allowing a story to evolve spontaneously instead of marshalling events in a structured sequence. While potentially fruitful, the result in this ...
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Reviews
Kandahar (Safar E Ghandehar)
Dir: Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Iran/ France. 2001. 85 mins. An astonishing journey through the archaic, rarely seen world of Afghanistan, Kandahar is a polished, sumptuously photographed indictment of conditions there. Aimed, with its part English-language soundtrack and scenes spelling out the political situation, squarely at an international audience it is, if ...
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Reviews
Bridget Jones's Diary
Dir: Sharon Maguire. UK. 2001. 90minsTBC.Bridget Jones's bestselling diaries made the fictional thirtysomething singleton Britain's most successful under-achiever of recent years, and the screen version of her intimate journal bears all the signs of becoming the UK's biggest film hit since Notting Hill. Domestically, massive advance publicity and media attention ...
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Reviews
Dead Babies
Dir: William Marsh. UK. 2000. 105mins.Successful as they may be in the literary world, Martin Amis' books have proved resistant to cinema adaptation, the sole previous attempt being the anodyne and poorly-received 1989 version of The Rachel Papers. Dead Babies, Amis' second novel, written in 1974, has been a long ...