Reviews

It´s really refreshing to watch a film that doesn´t overdo things and keeps you interested all the time. Excellent cast. Good photography. It´s very realistic and doesn´t lag like all those "artsy-fartsy" films that try to bowl you over with supposed slice-of-life stories, stupid characters and lousy story-lines, spliced with needless violence and sex. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. HOPE YOU ENJOY IT.

It's been a long time since the last Mission Impossible II film (2000), but No. III comes in with a gigantic bang. It has to be the best action flick of the year and a great film in any other sense. It keeps you on the edge of your seats all of the time and proves once and again that the Hitchcockian McGuffin is still as important nowadays as it was in Hitch's good days. Here it's referred to as a Rabbit's Foot. As all of us remember, the McGuffin is a device or plot element that catches the viewer's attention or drives the plot and is essentially something that the entire story is built around and yet has no real relevance. The action and the acting is so good that at the end nobody really cares about the Rabbit's Foot or McGuffin that caused all the fuss. Don't miss it if you like good action, modern cinematography, fast cutting, great chases and stunts done by none other than Tom Cruise himself.

I'm a film director/editor from Colombia with more than 45 years in the business and this film is absolutely the best essay on film editing that I've had the good luck of seeing. The examples are great, the explanations on the "unseen" or "hidden art" of editing are perfect, the pacing is just right, etc., etc. The only thing I felt was that it was too short, but then I'm biased on the subject. This should be a MUST SEE FILM for everybody starting out in the business (and not just those who want to be editors).This is a solid "10" for me and I can't understand how anybody would consider it less, except for those mediocre joes who just can't cut it...

This is probably one of the most beautifully shot FX films in a long time, capturing the dark moody atmosphere of the early German impressionistic films, using some of the best background mattes seen in a long time. Unfortunately the skimpy story-line doesn't hold up for the long running time and audiences will start to get bored way before the end title. Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing and Kate Beckinsale as Anna Valerious are perfect in their roles. Richard Roxburgh has a wonderful time chewing-up all the scenery available as the campy Count Vladislaus Dracula and David Wenham brings comedy-relief to the side-kick part of Carl. Even though the ending will come as a surprise (and a disappointment) for most general audiences, anyhow this visually handsome film should do GREAT business in the boxoffice.

It's very probable that I'm not in the right age category to review this film (the 10 to 30-35 age group), which is probably one of this year's most eagerly awaited films, but I found it even more of a bore than the first one. At least in the first one some of the special effects were ground-breaking, but they've been so over-used in the interim in other features and in commercials that this time around they seem old-hat. And since there's not too much of a story-line to interest viewers it becomes just a matter of waiting to go from one action scene to the other. And at that, one of the longest scenes in the film is a fight on top of one extremely loooong truck speeding full throttle along one of L.A.'s murderous freeways which seems to last hours instead of the normal minutes! It's a shame that Hollywood can't find something better to do with all of the millions of dollars that seem to float in its rarified air. Barely a 5 out of 10.

The basic reason that I'm writing this review is because I'm appalled at the negative comments regarding this excellent, off-beat film. People have become so used to the awful garbage (I would use more appropriate, colorful language, but I don't want to offend) that Hollywood serves up on a daily basis that when a film tries to be a little different, they can't cope with it. Sean Penn has done an excellent job as a director and his handling of cameos by Benecio Del Toro, Vanessa Redgrave, Mickey Rourke, and, of course, Jack Nicholson in the leading role, are on their own worth the admission ticket or rental. Don't be fooled, if you like good cinema, don't miss this film. You won't be disappointed.

Let me first state that I consider "Apocalypse Now" in my top 5 best films of all times and the botched, bloated Redux version will not change my opinion. When I first saw the film it was more than just a motion picture, it was a horrifying exploration into the Vietnam war and just like Coppola has stated that it "was not a film about the Vietnam war, but the Vietnam war", the picture gripped me more than any before or any after. It is truly a film masterpiece in every respect. Unfortunately the new Redux version is something else. First of all, it incorporates three sequences (the Playboy bunnies in a stranded helicopter, the French plantation and its strange ghost-like characters and the ridiculous scene of Kurtz reading paragraphs from Time magazine to a tied-up Willard), which should have remained in their natural habitat: the cutting-room floor. The rest of the film is a strange mixture of scenes successfully extended to give more insight into the characters, or the excellent dissolve montage at the beginning with the ceiling fan, the stealing of Colonel Kilgore's surfing board, the expansion of Kurtz's dialogue near the end where he comes in and out of shadows, but gone is the tight and to the point editing that turned this river journey from a terrifying and gripping nightmare into a milk run or travelogue more suited for the Discovery or History Channels. They should have followed Willard's advice after the tiger incident: "don't ever get off the boat again". One scene in special comes to mind: the one where they open fire on the innocent Vietnamese on the boat that they meet in the river. In the original version this scene came at a moment that the tension in the film was so high that the gunner's reaction was totally motivated and came about as a release to the nervous tension that had everyone in the boat on the edge of insanity. In the new version the killing becomes just a senseless massacre without any motivation at all. And there are many other instances just like it, but hard to pin down from seeing this version only once. Also, the absence of the original ending is a big disappointment. Anyhow, it is sad to see that even with 22 years of hindsight, Coppola still doesn't have the necessary objectivity to manipulate his material again. A prettier, larger package doesn't necessarily make a better film.

This Spanish film is basically well carried out by director Vicente Aranda and his leading actors, Aitana Sanchez-Gijón and Daniel Gimenez, but the ending is absolutely senseless because it doesn't confront the dramatic situation that is being set up during its long 110-minutes of running time. It leaves the audience with a feeling of having been cheated out of a more interesting denoument, without having to take what to us is the "easy" way out. For such a let-down of an ending, the film should have been shorter.

The so-called "road films" are slowly becoming a Mexican film cliché with three recent films falling into this dubious category: María Novaro's "Sin Dejar Huella", Juan Carlos de Llaca's "Por La Libre" and now Alfonso Cuaron's "Y Tu Mamá También", which is by far the worst of the three. They all have the same structure of travelling by car, insipid dialogues and a lot of long, boring travelogue footage of the Mexican countryside. On top of this is the story of two 17-year old kids that are Mexico's intellectual rivals of Beavis and Butthead, who are hot on the trail of the clueless 28-year old wife ( Maribel Verdu) of the cousin of one of the two dumbheads, who has the bright idea of following these two jerks to a far-off beach called Boca del Cielo, spiced with some insipid sex-scenes, a lot of crude bodily functions, all done in the spirit of trying to be "original" and "shocking", sentiments that are never reached by Cuaron's pedestrian directing and total absense of close-ups in one of the dullest films of the year. Near the end of the film there is a scene in an outdoor eatery where the camera holds on a long shot of the three main characters for what must be four or five minutes of the longest, most boring sequence we have seen in a long time. Cuaron must have gone to sleep when he shot this sequence and forgot to yell "cut!" To wrap it up, the film has absolutely nothing going for it except for the soft-core titillation of some sequences that don't really amount to much and the empty ramblings of the three main characters. And what is really ridiculous is that the filmmakers decided to add a voice-over narration that has all the makings of an after-thought that is the most annoying, self-conscious tripe of "social awareness" bs that we have seen, especially since it has absolutely nothing to do with the "story" at hand. Ironically, this film, which has absolutely no interesting story-line and looks as if it were improvised in its totality, received the "Best Screenplay" award in the recent Venice Film Festival and the Beavis and Butthead couple of young actors (Gael Garcia and Diego Luna) received the Marcelo Mastroianni Acting Award, which says a lot about these overblown festivals...

Even though I notice that this film is incredibly well rated by practically everybody in this section, I for one felt that it was a totally amateurish, snobbish film aimed more at causing impact than in really telling the story that it set out to depict. Following most of the guidelines of the "Dogma 95" commandments, which are a complete negation of everything I learned at film school and which I have been practicing successfully for more than forty years as a film director-editor, the film has some of the most horrible camerawork, lighting (or absense of) and is a homage to the jump-cut school of film editing. It is a shame that this film, which is a spear-head of the digital revolution, should represent digital cinema in such a shoddy manner. Just seeing it should make a lot of uncertain filmmakers embrace their film stock with heartfelt thanks. The whole ambient of the film, which is supposed to happen in the United States, is so totally faked and badly represented by the actors that it loses the empathy that it is trying to achieve. Lars Von Trier criticises Björk because "she was living the role instead of acting". Isn't this exactly what all directors expect of their actors or is that another one of the commandments of the Dogma crowd? Anyhow, her acting is practically the only saving grace of the whole film together with the beautiful symphonic opening (which leads one to expect something really exceptional) and some parts of the musical numbers, which leave you with the feeling that the best parts were left in the cutting room floor. Björk gets a 9 out of 10 from me and the film as a whole 2 out of 10.