2017
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DVD Review: Jacques Becker Restored
★★★★★ Often relegated to the shadow of his friend and mentor Jean Renoir, and never attributed with the same influence as Truffaut, Godard and the other Nouvelle Vague critics-turned-directors, Jacques Becker remains a largely hidden, or at least underappreciated, gem of French cinema. StudioCanal’s stellar four-disc selection shines a welcome light on the versatile, humanist,…
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Film Review: The Untamed
★★★★☆ While Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu are busy across the border in Hollywood, Amat Escalante has taken up the reins as his country’s controversial festival darling. He is, in effect, the bad boy of contemporary Mexican cinema.Since his emergence in 2005, when he presented Sangre in the Un Certain Regard…
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Film Review: Quest
★★★★☆ Quest director Jonathan Olshefski spent nine years befriending and filming the Raineys, beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, and ending with the ascendancy of Trump; inauspicious bookends marking a tumultuous decade.The finished documentary is a meditative study in the everyday realities of poverty, gun crime, and racism, whilst offering a moving portrayal…
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Film Review: Dark Night
★★☆☆☆ The defining quality of poetry is that much of the page is blank. This is the ‘white space’ literary critic Christopher Ricks claimed that words dissolve into, allowing the reader room to think. In Tim Sutton’s Dark Night, that white space becomes little more than a blank stare.Sutton’s film is often wilfully obscurantist, supporting…
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Film Review: Atomic Blonde
★★★★☆ The opening credits to David Leitch’s Atomic Blonde boldly announce that this is not the story of the Berlin Wall’s fall – its symbolic destruction instead serving as a backdrop for superspy Lorraine Broughton’s (Charlize Theron) often thrilling misadventures.Opening on the first of many gorgeously composed, monochromatic shots, Lorraine emerges from an ice bath,…
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DVD Review: The Saga of Anatahan
★★★★★ In 1944, a Japanese ship is sunk and its twelve crew seek refuge on the nearby Pacific island of Anatahan. Loosely based on real events, Josef von Sternberg’s 1953 tale of shipwrecked Japanese soldiers is one of desperation, base desire and the instability of moral codes.The crew quickly discover that Anatahan is already inhabited…
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DVD Review: The Fabulous Baron Munchausen
★★★★☆ Czech master filmmaker Karel Zeman draws liberally from literary and cinematic history to create his sumptuous and whimsical fantasy adventure The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, made with his signature flair. The film is now available once again thanks to Second Run DVD.The Fabulous Baron Munchausen begins with a virtuoso sequence in which the evolution of…
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Film Review: Tom of Finland
★★★☆☆ Artistic expression as means of self-determination and liberation from oppression is explored to poignant effect in Tom of Finland, Dome Karukoski’s biographical feature on the life and pioneering work of homoerotic fetish artist Touko Laaksonen.Arcing from his involvement in World War II, through his development in the 1950s and 60s, and onto the height…
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Film Review: Step
★★★★★ Shot in Baltimore, the inspirational Step documents the true-life story of a high-school step dance team and follows the hopes and struggles of a group of young women fighting to achieve their goals and realise their dreams, amongst a backdrop of poverty.The Baltimore Leadership School for Young Women, an all-girl, public school for low-income…
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Film Review: A Ghost Story
★★★★☆ Using Virginia Woolf’s short story A Haunted House as a primer, Sundance Film Festival alumni David Lowery returns with his third feature, A Ghost Story, in what is a visually arresting, poignant tale of loss and grief starring Casey Affleck and a superb Rooney Mara.With a pervading eerie quality, Lowery’s twist on a classic…