The Twilight Saga: New Moon -- Film Review
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Rachel Ward dares to go where many first-time filmmakers would fear to tread with "Beautiful Kate," a provocative slice of Southern Gothic refried Aussie-style.
It's not easy to find a fresh slant on a Cold War spy story, but the French film "Farewell" almost manages to reinvigorate the genre.
Berlinger's reputation as a skilled filmmaker-journalist and the topical subject matter make "Crude" must-viewing for those who care about the planet.
The film could have certainly had a tighter script, for it takes a long time to come to the point. Too many characters flit in and out of the screen, and in the end they appear two-dimensional and rather flat.
George A. Romero's "Survival of the Dead" is a polished, fast-moving, entertaining picture whose mainstream success will depend on audiences' tolerance of its tendency to become an abattoir of extreme carnage.
Here the personalities are less familiar to North American audiences because they dwell within the storied ranks of English football. And the stakes feel ... well, rather unimportant.
The opening-night film at the Toronto International Film Festival is an intelligent, touching depiction of a brilliant man sure of his scientific skills but tormented not only by remorse over the loss of a beloved child but by the realization that he has lost his faith.
Jacques Rivette's "Around a Small Mountain" is a fable about chance encounters and lost love set against a small traveling circus in France, but it feels more like the characters are going round a molehill.
Striking images and the suggestion that life is a series of random events that might be repeated make "Between Two Worlds" intriguing.
Although this story of the last days of Leo Tolstoy is specialized material, it packs an emotional wallop that costume pictures often lack. "Station" has the potential to be a substantial art house hit. It also is the high-water mark in Michael Hoffman's 20-year career.
The emotional traumas of young Israeli soldiers drafted into the war with Lebanon in the 1980s are recounted through the eyes of a tank crew in this wrenching concentration of raw emotion directed by Samuel Maoz.
An anti-Army comedy toplining George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey should have been funnier than this.
The movie is self-consciously artsy, and too often the spectator senses the filmmakers striving after effect, whether through circular pans, black and white sequences, posed compositions, dummy figures posted in the landscape or the frequent use of masks.
Twenty-four hours in the life of a Chilean peasant family is not an obvious recipe for movie entertainment, but taken on its own terms, Alejandro Fernandez Alemandras' debut feature, "Huacho," is a success that will find plenty of admirers on the festival circuit. Its minimalist style and lack of dramatic action mean that its commercial prospects are pretty much zero.
Anurag Kashyap's "Gulaal" presents a giant of a canvas, and like an exuberant painter wanting to fill every corner of it with every conceivable color, the director touches upon a mind-boggling variety of issues. The film is unlikely to travel much beyond the Indian diaspora.
It must have taken a lot of guts for Anurag Kashyap to have helmed "Dev.D." Based on the early 20th-century classic Bengali novel "Devdas," by Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay, Kashyap's work follows several films on the same subject, many directed by masters.
Award-winning shorts director Claudio Noce uses too many stylistic tricks to create mood in "Good Morning Aman," a film in which the camera moves far more than the story.
A moody, minimalist thriller, "The Accident" is not what one would expect from this Soi Cheange-Johnnie To collaboration. It features little action but is a brilliantly conceived paranoid spiral of a professional hit man.
Luca Guadagnino's "I Am Love" starts off dynamically, even with its old-fashioned credits and majestic symphonic flair. No coincidence, the film is a modern melodrama, both sweeping and constrained, that blooms slowly.
Japanese filmmaker Shinya Tsukamoto shows what a "Transformers" movie would be like on a shoestring budget with "Tetsuo the Bullet Man," which features a man whose mother was an android and whose half-human half-machine body comes to sprout an arsenal of fearsome weapons.
Following in the wake of Goran Paskaljevic's Serbian trilogy -- "The Powder Keg," "Midwinter Night's Dream" and "The Optimists" -- "Honeymoons" addresses the Balkan youth drain, in a tale about two young couples, one Serbian and one Albanian, who leave their countries to seek greener pastures in Europe.
One of the most popular early titles at the Venice film festival is the aptly titled documentary "Videocracy," a skillful compilation of archive footage describing contemporary Italy as a mirror of prime minister Silvio Berlusconi's commercial television empire.
Before Jason Reitman's film plunges into deeper waters, it seduces us with some of the most darkly hilarious moments to grace the screen in years.
Oliver Stone's "South of the Border" is a rebuttal of what he views as the fulminations and lies of right-wing media at home and abroad regarding the socialist democracies of South America.
Given the desperate state of the world economy, "Capitalism: A Love Story" should find attentive audiences along with many angry detractors who will give it free publicity.
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