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Reel Weekend | 25 April 2008
Based on a graphic novel, the beautifully hand-drawn, black-and-white Persepolis is an autobiographical story of Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian woman who spent the first decade of her life living a relatively happy childhood in Tehran, before being packed off to Vienna by her liberal parents. The film is a masterclass in economic story-telling, effectively condensing many years into just over 90 minutes, and Satrapi and writer-director Vincent Paronnaud manage to find verbal and visual humour in even the darkest of situations.
Reel Weekend | 25 April 2008
Horror flick The Eye is directed by David Moreau and Xavier Palud, who proved last year that they could deliver the scary goods with the French shocker Them. Unfortunately they seem to have left everything that made that film so successful in their homeland because The Eye is about as generic as Hollywood horror gets. The movie plays like a Frankenstein's monster of recent horror hits, and the scriptwriters are so aware that this material is utterly derivative that they even include a jokey reference to The Sixth Sense in the dialogue.
Reel Weekend | 18 April 2008
Acclaimed playwright Martin McDonagh's debut feature In Bruges is probably the first hitman movie to be set in Belgium, a country better known for worryingly fruity beer, Poirot and Jean Claude Van Damme than a violent criminal underworld. The hitmen in this case are a pair of Irishmen, played by Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, who come to the quaint medieval town of the title to cool off after a hit back in London goes wrong...
Reel Weekend | 18 April 2008
Protégé is a gritty new Hong Kong thriller that's been a massive hit in its homeland. It's a hard-hitting anti-drugs tale in which a cop called Nick has spent seven years infiltrating a heroin gang, run by grey-haired Lin Quin (Andy Lau). It manages to mix some old-school cop high-jinks with a tough addiction drama, and although you've seen it before, the cat-and-mouse game between gang boss and undercover rozzer is grippingly told, with some first-rate acting from upcoming star Daniel Wu, as well as veteran Lau.
Reel Weekend | 18 April 2008
Kit Ryan's Botched is an Irish-funded but Russia-set movie that begins like any other heist flick – a veteran thief is forced to do one last job by mobsters after a diamond robbery goes badly wrong. Unfortunately for our hero (played by Colin Farrell), but luckily for the audience, this job ends up involving gun-toting nuns, exploding rats and a psychotic killer who believes he is the reincarnation of Vlad the Impaler.
Reel Weekend | 11 April 2008
William Shakespeare might be the world's greatest ever playwright, dealing with all facets of the human condition, but if he'd been around today he's almost certainly be working in movies. Probably churning out scripts for Adam Sandler vehicles. But since we don't have the man himself, his plays continue to provide rich source material for the cinema screen. The Banquet is the latest movie to take inspiration from the bard, in this case Hamlet. This is the classic tale of murder, revenge and royal power struggles, as relocated to 1st century China.
Reel Weekend | 11 April 2008
The week’s biggest release is the No.1 American box office hit 21. This isn’t the fourteenth sequel to Seven, or an early film in the epic series that finished with 2001, but a Vegas-based gambling about six young maths geniuses who used their numerical prowess to score big on Vegas’s blackjack tables. Although supposedly based on a true story, this tale has been seriously Hollywoodised, with hunky maths geeks, gorgeous maths girls, cheesy romantic subplots and sleazy college professors who look a lot like Kevin Spacey.
![Movie Review: [REC]](/i/t/vid/intro-stills/film_and_tv/reel_weekend/reelweekend_rec_160x90.jpg "Movie Review: [REC]")
Reel Weekend | 11 April 2008
It made a lot of money back in 1998, but it seems to have taken an entire decade for The Blair Witch Project to have a proper influence on genre cinema. In the past couple of months we’ve had Cloverfield and George Romero’s Diary Of The Dead shaking their handheld cameras in our faces, and now Spanish shocker [Rec] joins the club. One night a fire crew is called to an apartment building where an old lady is apparently trapped in her apartment. Unfortunately the poor dear has turned into a demented contagion-ridden zombie, and when the authorities seal off the entire building our survivors must find another way out.
Behind the scenes: Quantum of Solace
Reel Report | 07 April 2008
An early look behind the scenes on the latest James Bond movie Quantum of Solace, due out in late 2008. In this short video Reel Report gets a peek at what we can expect in the eagerly anticipated follow-up to Casino Royale, from locations in Panama to low-flying planes in the desert. We can't tell too much about the plot from this short featurette but Quantum looks set to deliver the requisite amounts of action, drama and Daniel Craig in a tux.
Reel Weekend | 04 April 2008
Anyone who goes to see Funny Games at the cinema expecting a raucous night out is going to be in for a nasty shock – this film is far from funny. Director Michael Haneke's 2008 English-language version is almost a shot-for-shot remake of his original 1997 German-language version, with the same levels of kidnap, brutal torture and murder. The only real addition to this recent version is Naomi Watts, who spends a lot more time in her underwear than the original actress had to.
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