★★☆☆☆ The late British director Roger Michell’s final film, The Duke is based on the true story of Kempton Bunton (played here by Jim Broadbent), a pensioner from Benwell in Newcastle upon Tyne who, in 1961, stole Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery.
★★★★☆ Following a group of teenage girls, La Mif is a nuanced and moving study of life in a care home in Geneva. No single performer – largely non-professional actors – in the piece stands above the rest. Rather, the cast work in unison to give a singular, outstanding ensemble performance.
The Toronto International Film Festival is long past and folks are now looking forward to this year’s Academy Awards – the 94th Academy Awards, to be precise. And you can almost be certain last month’s festival will have an impact on the upcoming Oscars.
★★★☆☆ Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s The Real Charlie Chaplin grapples with the conundrum at the heart of the silent era’s greatest clown: that no one could ever know really know the person behind the performance.
★★★★★ Adapted from the novel by Alexey Salnikov’s, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Petrov’s Flu is as dense and impenetrable as it is lurching, captivating and perplexing. It’s a captivating, purgatorial nightmare that describes the feverish breakdown of post-Soviet Russian society.
★★★★★ Flee is a thought-provoking exploration of one man’s flight from the Taliban’s tyranny in Afghanistan. Blurring traditional boundaries of documentary with rich, beautiful animation, director Jonas Poher Rasmussen has a great deal invested in telling this story.
The nominations for this year’s 94th Academy Awards were announced earlier this afternoon. Jane Campion’s Netflix western The Power of the Dog led the chasing pack with 12 nods, while Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune received 10.
This afternoon saw the nominations announced for this year’s British Academy Film Awards, to be held on March 13 back at its traditional home, London’s Royal Albert Hall, after a year online. Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune received the most nominations.
★★★★★ Perhaps the biggest difference between The Souvenir and Part II is its shift towards comedy. Whereas the first film charted a doomed love affair, this second outing takes the aftermath of grief and the process of recovery, charting a surprisingly comic path.
★★★★★ Director Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s sixth fiction feature arrives after it took his native Chad by storm last year. Telling the story of women bound by oppression, Lingui, The Sacred Bonds is an astonishing film of female resistance and survival.
