All Toronto articles – Page 154
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Reviews
Man From Plains
Dir. Jonathan Demme. US 2007. 125 mins.Man from Plains follows the former US president Jimmy Carter from his sprawling family peanut farm in southern Georgia to a national book tour on which the earnest man who brokered the Camp David Accords defends his controversial view that Israel imposes rules akin ...
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Reviews
Shake Hands with the Devil
Dir. Roger Spottiswoode. Canada 2007, 113 Mins.The tragic recent history that informed Hotel Rwanda is viewed from another angle in Shake Hands with the Devil. Viewed from the perspective of General Romeo Dallaire, who commanded United Nations forces during the 1993 crisis, it paints a picture of broader dimension that ...
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Reviews
Erik Nietzsche - The Early Years (Erik Nietzsche - De Unge Ar)
Dir.Jacob Thuesen. Denmark . 2007. 91 min.Lars von Trier's revenge on the Danish film industry is a very funny inside joke. A not-so-fond evisceration of film school, filmmakers, actors (more precisely oversexed Danish actresses), technicians, guilds and unions, the picaresque film follows its eponymous hero through a circus of cinema-related ...
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Reviews
Shadows
Dir/Scr: Milcho Manchevski. Macedonia 2007. 120mins.A ghost story that draws on the irrational to explore the historical and cultural redress of displaced Macedonians, Milcho Manchevski's third feature Shadows is ambitious and capably mounted. However it is too fastidious for its own good, and is damaged by dramatically contradictory parts that ...
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Reviews
Love Comes Lately
Dir. Jan Schutte. Germany/Austria/US 2007. 86 min.Jan Schutte's adaptation of three short-stories by the Yiddish writer and Nobel-prize winner Isaac Bashevis Singer will attract mostly mature audiences who will identify with its central character, octogenarian writer Max Kohn. Like most adaptations of works by great authors, the picture faces the ...
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Reviews
Reclaim Your Brain (Free Rainer-Dein Fernseher Lugt)
Dir. Hans Weingartner. Germany . 2007. 132 minsAnyone who has ever railed against the pernicious poison of reality television should derive a scattering of wry chuckles from Reclaim Your Brain, a Capra-esque call to arms from writer/director Hans Weingartner. Taking aim at some obvious targets, it is slow to warm ...
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Reviews
The Take
Dir: Brad Furman. US 2007. 96 mins.The Take is a potentially very interesting film that suffers from a bad case of bi-polar disorder. On the one hand, a gritty, often exciting crime-and-caper movie, and on the other hand an authentic-feeling domestic drama set in one of the Latino barrios of ...
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Reviews
Dainipponjin
Dir. Hitoshi Matsumoto. Japan, 2007.With similar credentials to those Takeshi Kitano had before he made movies, but determined to take a different approach for his debut, Hitoshi Matsumoto looks set to establish a reputation as a quirky, bizarre type of humourist. His first film should qualify with equal ease for ...
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Reviews
The Babysitters
Dir. David Ross. US. 2007. 90mins.First time director David Ross negotiates a precarious line between exploitation and provocation with The Babysitters, the story of a bright and industrious teenager who fronts a high school escort service for bored suburban men. It inverts the story of Risky Business, moving away from ...
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Reviews
Poor Boy's Game
Dir. Clement Virgo. Canada , 2007. 102 Mins.Racial tension in an unusual setting and a quiet, authoritative voice pack a surprising punch in Poor Boy's Game, a new film from Afro-Canadian filmmaker Clement Virgo. Though framed around a grudge match in the boxing ring, the film has a considerably broader ...
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Reviews
Trumbo
Dir: Peter Askin. US. 2007. 96mins.Peter Askin's endearing and sometimes strangely compromised documentary portrait Trumbo, a meditation on the life and times of the radical American screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, is an alternately rich and often bewildering mixture of theatre, family memoir and hot wired historical document.The film's portrait of an ...
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Reviews
In Bloom
Dir: Vadim Perelman. US. 2007. 90 mins.Four years after his directorial debut The House Of Sand And Fog, Vadim Perelman returns with In Bloom, an adaptation of Laura Kasischke's novel The Life Before Her Eyes which is an even more ambitious challenge than its predecessor. But some books are just ...
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Reviews
The Princess of Nebraska
Dir: Wayne Wang. US. 2007. 77mins.Wayne Wang's The Princess of Nebraska is a stylistically audacious companion piece to the director's A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, adapted from the same collection of short stories by expatriate Chinese writer Yiyun Li. Like Blue in the Face, the improvisational variant of his ...
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Reviews
A Gentle Breeze in the Village (Tennen Kokekko)
Dir. Nobuhiro Yamashita. Japan , 2007. 121 min.Rarely has a title fit so perfectly the picture bearing it. Cute, corny and inoffensive, with just a pinch of salt to suggest the flavour of the old Yamashita, whose reputation lies mostly with tongue-in-cheek deadpan Jarmusch-like satires such as The Ramblers and ...
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Reviews
A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
Dir: Wayne Wang. US. 2007. 83mins.After a series of Hollywood assignments, the eclectic and unpredictable Wayne Wang has fashioned an old fashioned classical piece in A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, written by the highly regarded Chinese writer Yiyun Li, who adapted her own short story. The minor key and ...
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Reviews
New York City Serenade
Dir. Frank Whaley. US 2007. 103 mins.The title of New York City Serenade and an opening aerial skyline shot would lead you to believe that the film is an ode to New York . It's really an ode to friendship with a friend who gets you to the wrong places ...