The Twilight Saga: New Moon -- Film Review
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Very pretty people seen against beautiful landscapes provide most of the enjoyment in Chinese director Yonfan's glossy melodrama set in Taiwan in the 1950s when the hunt for communists on the island led to the period known as the white terror.
Charismatic stars and the film's Gallic shrug of acceptance over the difficulties that being in love creates will take the film to festivals and art houses, but it's far from a classic.
First-timer Angela Ismailos traveled the world to interview her favorite filmmakers in the documentary "Great Directors."
Filled with unexpected turns and subversive humor, Werner Herzog's film is a jazzy, entertaining riff on the theme of a cop who spends too much time in a sewer of criminality and corruption.
"Life During Wartime" is a heady mix of deadpan humor that boldly uses such topics as pedophilia, race and terrorism to plead the need for forgiveness at a personal and national level.
Inspired by a true World War II event, "Tickling Leo," about a cross-generational New York Jewish family dealing with its Holocaust past, was a family effort offscreen: Writer/debuting director Jeremy Davidson is married to actress Mary Stuart Masterson, who produced the film with her Barn Door Pictures partners Peter C.B. Masterson, her brother and the film's cinematographer, and longtime collaborator Steven Weisman.
In "The Road," director John Hillcoat has performed an admirable job of bringing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel to the screen as an intact and haunting tale.
The future looks bleak in "Metropia," the computer-animated sci-fi feature by Tarik Saleh.
When things go as seriously wrong as they do in the Sandra Bullock comedy "All About Steve," a viewer is challenged to guess what the filmmakers thought they were doing.
Seductive ambience and dapper style hold sway in "Private Eye," a lurid mystery that unearths serial murder, drug racketeering and sexual corruption in turn-of-the-19th-century Korea.
Just because "Invitation Only" claims to be Taiwan's first slasher film doesn't mean it brings anything new to the carving table of torture porn. Its set-up of five people lured into an exclusive party only to serve as savage entertainment for the rich is basically "Hostel" transplanted to a hollow set with even hollower grounds for gross-out cruelty.
There is no final in "The Final Destination," the fourth installment of New Line's body-dismantling gorefest. The franchise threatens to never end. The new gimmick here is that all the flying body parts and absurd impalements come in 3D. And that's about as inspired as anything gets in this edition.
Jeff Bridges and Justin Timberlake play a pair of estranged father-and-son baseball players in "The Open Road," a dreary dramedy of a road film that starts off ploddingly and proceeds to only grow more so as it crawls along.
It's deja vu all over again, with this sequel to 2007's $80 million-grossing reboot of the "Halloween" franchise that apparently is as hard to kill off as its central character.
Close your eyes. Now, imagine your grandparents having sex. That is roughly akin to the effect of "Play the Game," a cringe-worthy comedy about multigenerational romantic gameplaying that offers the dubiously entertaining prospect of watching Andy Griffith receiving oral sex.
Some things will never change, not even for the apocalypse. According to the new French film "Les Derniers Jours du Monde," when the final trumpet sounds, its citizens will have their minds on sex, a bottle of fine wine and a visit to the opera even as the bodies pile up in the street.
German cinema's growing number of films willing to address topics relating to World War II has a fine addition in Ludi Boeken's "Under Bauern: Saviors of the Night", which tells of farmers in Westphalia who sheltered Jewish friends from the Nazis.
Swiss director Frederic Mermoud's "Partners" is a police procedural with sex that deals with two sets of couples on both sides of the law involved in the murder of a male prostitute.
"Post Grad" is an innocuous -- to the point of blandness -- look at the "hardships" of a recent college grad as she struggles to land the perfect job and perfect boyfriend and wonders why it isn't easier, like getting an A on a history exam.
For a comedy, "Extract" is kinda depressing. Understand that wildly dysfunctional characters have become the norm in American comedies, but the characters in "Extract" give dysfunction a bad name.
For 11 minutes, "9" is a mind-blower. But at 81 minutes and with famous actors voicing director Shane Acker's characters, the new "9" is something less.
Sophisticated and insightful, Christoph Schaub's "Julia's Disappearance" is a romantic comedy about getting older that should charm grown-up audiences keen for wry laughs without sentimentality.
Screenwriter-directors Alan Mak and Felix Chong take the shady concept of eavesdropping, plants it in Hong Kong's wheeling-and-dealing financial sector and sets in motion a tightly-coiled, character-driven, morally ambiguous parable of crime and punishment.
The decibels, energy and overall quality are high in writer-director Kari Skogland's "Fifty Dead Men Walking," her supremely well-made, highly stylized, graphic tale of Northern Ireland's "Troubles" in the late 1980s.
This blend of classic adultery story and class conflict invites comparisons with Pascale Ferran's "Lady Chatterley," a boxoffice and critical hit two years ago. Corsini's movie will appeal to similar audiences, though whether with similar success remains to be seen.
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