Category: Clara Bradbury-Rance
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Film Review: Ali & Ava
★★★★★ In Ali & Ava, Yorkshire-born director Clio Barnard’s fourth feature film, two lovers defy the aged, gendered, classed and racialised expectations of their families and communities. Ali (Adeel Akhtar) is a landlord with a gift for the gab and a tender care for his tenants.
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BFI Flare 2021: Festival highlights
Always hotly anticipated by London’s LGBTIQ+ communities, BFI Flare went fully online this year, 26 features and even more shorts finding new audiences for a glorious programme full of soul, provocation, warmth, wit and sex. Continuing a trend, the festival divided its programme into three umbrella themes: hearts, minds, and bodies. These categories make for…
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Film Review: How to Build a Girl
★★★☆☆ Adapting her semi-autobiographical novel How to Build a Girl for the screen, Caitlin Moran has created with co-writer John Niven and director Coky Giedroyc a funny and touching coming-of-age story that occasionally loses its way, just like its protagonist. Growing up with haphazard parents and too many siblings on a Wolverhampton estate, Johanna Morrigan (Beanie…
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Film Review: Women Make Film: A New Road Movie Through Cinema
★★★★☆ In his follow-up to The Story of Film: An Odyssey, Mark Cousins takes us on a “new road movie through cinema”, a 14-hour virtual film school made up entirely of the all-too-often forgotten links: masterful films directed by women. Please note that this is a review of the complete 14-hour film. “The film industry…
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Film Review: And Then We Danced
★★★★★ In his third feature, Levan Akin makes traditional Georgian dance a boldly cinematic affair, combining the disciplined physicality of a dance film with the lingering gazes of a slow-burning love story. A perfect double bill for Portrait of a Lady on Fire, released last month, And Then We Danced is a pulsing drama about…
