Cinema

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Rumor Has It…

Rumor Has It is a Rob Reiner comedy that sort of takes off where The Graduate left off in some comically intriguing ways. If you can believe in Dustin Hoffman mutating into Kevin Costner, and Anne Bancroft, the original Mrs Robinson, into Shirley MacLaine, then the addition of bubbly Jennifer

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La Marche de L’Empereur

La March De LEmpereur (The March of the Penguins), the highly acclaimed French documentary about Emperor penguins in Antarctica will be shown in the original French version.

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Gosford Park

Tea at four. Dinner at eight. Murder at midnight. You get the picture. Upstairs- downstairs interaction and genteel back-stabbing in this Agatha Christie-like English country-house murder mystery. Not immediately identifiable as Altman territory, but on closer acquaintance, Gosford Park is full of his unmistakable trademarks: a large

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The Interpreter

Realism again in a political thriller set in and around the UN building in New York in Sidney Pollacks The Interpreter. Nicole Kidman is the UN interpreter who overhears a death threat against the African dictator (probably Robert Mugabe),with Secret Service agent Sean Penn investigating. Apart from a few

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Manderlay

Part 2 of Lars von Triers projected US History trilogy that began with Dogville, Manderlay is thus the second installment of his finger-wagging chronicle of American ugliness. Race relations, this time in 1930s Alabama, where slavery continued unchecked since the Civil War, again come under scrutiny in the abstract

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The Player

The Best Movie Ever Made- Griffin Mill. Not surprisingly, Griffin Mill is the character played by Tim Robbins, a Hollywood studio executive who has the power to hire or fire and finds himself inundated with death threats from a rejected writer, with whom he has several bizarre and conclusive encounters.

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An Unfinished Life

Dumbed down gritty realism down on the ranch (Wyo) in rapidly declining Lasse Hallstroms An Unfinished Life, and unpretentious (i.e clich-ridden) reconciliation movie not afraid of pain, suffering and trauma, but perhaps too fond of melodrama and sentimentality, (and bears). Widowed Jean (surreally immaculate Jennifer Lopez) and her

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Crash

You think you know who you are. You have no idea. Paul Haggiss intense and revealing movie Crash plays on this idea to confront the inherent racism lurking in the subconscious of each one of us. Cross-cutting through the lives of a (racially) disparate cross section of L.A.

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Flightplan

Judy Foster does a sort of airborne Panic Room routine in German director Robert Shwentkes tightly plotted, intriguingly unraveled Hitchcockian whodunit thriller Flightplan, as the mother of a daughter who inexplicably vanishes on a transatlantic flight. Mysteries within mysteries complicate any pretensions towards a comfortable relationship with reality, but the

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The Long Goodbye

Robert Altmans controversial update of Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye, willfully torpedoes Chandlers highly regarded literary detective story and creates in its place a 1970s parody of Phillip Marlowe (Elliot Gould) as a shabby, disorganized, confused and confusing private eye, only loosely enclosed in Chandlers meticulously crafted criminal underworld. Another

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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Potterphiles will dutifully flock together for their annual pilgrimage to Hogwarts and Potterphobes will never know what theyve missed. Suffice to say that by all accounts, HP4 The Goblet of Fire is far and away the best of the movie franchise so far, darker, scarier and even more compelling than

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McCabe and Mrs. Miller

Generally considered one of the truly great movies of the 1970s, McCabe and Mrs. Miller is Robert Altmans poignant anti-Western Western, a genre-subverting multi-layered tour de force shot in grainy, washed-out colours and gloomy shadows in the snowbound landscape of the north-west frontier at the

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Elizabethtown

Youre always trying to break up with me and were not even together, says life-saving terminally upbeat flight attendant Claire (kooky Kirsten Dunst) to suicidal shoe designer Drew (bland Orlando Bloom) some way into their relationship, having first met on a flight as he is called to attend his

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The Brothers Grimm

Prepare to be disappointed be the maverick, eccentric and intermittently brilliant Terry Gilliams original, inventive and frantic take on the famous fairy tale creators Wilhelm and Jacob, The Brothers Grimm. Conceived as roving charlatans peddling their tales to a gullible German public in the time of Napoleon, the brothers are

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Cach

The controversial Austrian director Michael Heneke's Cach, ('Hidden') stars Daniel Auteuil and Juliette Binoche in a disturbing thriller that requires close concentration through to its open ending.

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Nashville

As its title suggests, Robert Altman's masterpiece is set in the world of Country music, but with its cast of 24 characters and almost the same number of intertwined and intersecting stories, it delves deep into the conciousness and conscience of America circa 1975 in Altman's unmistakable mosiac

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Serenity

Based on the TV series 'Firefly', 'Buffy the Vampire Slayer', 'Angel' (and 'Firefly') creator Joss Whedon's first feature film is a CGI-free sci-fi action adventure, in other words a good old-fashioned space opera, with a ready-made cult status, clever script and effective cast. By general

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The Legend of Zorro

Follow-up to the 1998 success The Mask of Zorro by the same director, the main attractions of that film, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Antonio Banderas are back in the rather less engaging continuation of the swashbuckling legend. What is lacks in credible story line it makes up for in

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Mash

A great 1970s classic, MASH is one of maverick director Robert Altman's most important films, and the one that enabled him to cock a snook at Hollywood and pursue an independent career. With gruesome black humour delivered with perfect timing by a cast of outstanding comic actors, anarchic improvisations

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Corpse Bride

The name Tim Burton is synonymous with eccentricity and the macabre, and leading it to this production (actually he's co-director) is guaranteed to pull an assortment Goths and stray spectres recovering from Halloween excess. Using stop-motion animation, Burton and Mike Johnson create a dark Victorian world of

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Oliver Twist

“Please, sir, I want some more…” and more we get from Roman Polanski’s adaptationof Dickens’s famous novel, the umpteenth screen version of the Victorian rags to riches story, which ears ...

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Wedding Crashers

‘Hide your bridemaids’ the tagline goes. And spare you embarrassment at a sad mad-cap misfire of a movie. Wedding crashers had all the best ideas for starters- a determined quest ...

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Wedding Crashers

‘Hide your bridemaids’ the tagline goes. And spare you embarrassment at a sad mad-cap misfire of a movie. Wedding crashers had all the best ideas for starters- a determined quest ...

Lifestyle

Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean

Introducing a seven part Robert Altman season, this example of the great American directors theatrical work from the 1980s follows on from the James Dean commemoration just finished. In a Texas diner, near the set of Giant, a fans reunion on the 20th anniversary of Deans death unearths old hostilities

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