July 2014
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DVD Review: ‘The Square’
★★★★☆ A revolution is a perpetually evolving entity, a constant presence in the lives of its participants. And yet, it’s rarely seen nor heard of once the white noise provided by visiting media conglomerates dissipates and they move on to new regions and with new entreaties to the bored mass populace of the West, offering…
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DVD Review: ‘The Lunchbox’
★★★☆☆ A nostalgic throwback to the Satyajit Ray heyday of Indian arthouse – though admittedly lacking much of Ray’s sociopolitical spice – Ritesh Batra’s The Lunchbox (2013) blends teasing comic romance with a not-unrealistic portrait of modern Mumbai. Irrfan Khan warms the cockles as the retiring (in every sense of the word) office worker picking…
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DVD Review: ‘In Bloom’
★★★★☆ Based on her own experiences growing up in Georgia, Nana Ekvtimishvili and Simon Gross’ In Bloom (2013) uses adolescence as the conduit in which to explore the confused identity of a country in transition. Perceptive and deftly handled, In Bloom transcends the usual coming of age clichés to depict a captivating portrait of urban…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Harold & Maude’
★★★☆☆ As artistic styles develop and audience sensibilities change, it’s inevitable that certain causes célèbres will lose a certain sense of purpose as the years go by. And yet, Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude remains as strange a proposition in 2014 as it must have in 1971. Ashby’s idiosyncrasies never quite fitted in with the…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘The Driver’
★★★★★ The B-movie form begins and ends with Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978). It’s the blueprint genre picture; a year zero for the modern cult canon. When the French Nouvelle Vague repurposed the American genres of the thirties and forties for the intellectual classes of the Parisian sixties, they gave the forms a new lease…
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Film Review: ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’
★☆☆☆☆ Could Michael Bay be considered an auteur? He certainly has his own line of distinctive tropes: the migraine-inducing noise, the fetishistic gloss, the playground-bully characters elevated to hero status and a fervently male gaze. That’s to be applauded for some – he has brought $3 billion into cinemas with the Transformers series, after all…
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Film Review: ‘How to Train Your Dragon 2’
★★★★☆ Few could have predicted the gargantuan success of DreamWorks’ 2010 franchise opener How to Train Your Dragon – an animated adaptation of Cressida Cowell’s children’s book series. It came out of nowhere to dazzle audiences to a tune of $500m worldwide with its soaring visuals and underlying poignancy. It’s little wonder then that Dean…
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Film Review: ‘Goltzius and the Pelican Company’
★★★☆☆ British auteur Peter Greenaway’s latest oddity, the elaborately titled Goltzius and the Pelican Company (2012), states its intentions in its opening minutes. A man dressed in immaculate period costume, replete with imposing coiffured barnet and an almost absurd European accent introduces himself directly to camera. This is Hendrik Goltzius, a Dutch printmaker being played…
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Film Review: ‘Cycling with Molière’
★★☆☆☆ Jean-Baptiste Poquelin – or Molière to use his nom de plume – created comedy out of farce and underlaid a fierce anger that railed against the church and moral hypocrisy. In Philippe Le Guay’s Cycling with Molière (2013), we have what François Truffaut called the cinéma de papa; a bland concoction that peters out…
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Film Review: ‘Boyhood’
★★★★★ The passage of time and the examination of characters across decades is clearly something that interests director Richard Linklater. After meeting the characters of Céline and Jesse (Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke) in his romantic amble around Vienna, Before Sunrise (1995), he returned to them again in 2004 and 2013 to further explore both…