D.W. Mault
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Film Review: ‘The Overnighters’
★★★★★ More American nightmare than American Dream, Jesse Moss’ Sundance award-winning documentary The Overnighters (2013) looks at the crisis at the centre of the economic collapse within the post-Empire confines of contemporary America. Coming at this point through the prism of Lutheran Pastor Jay Reinke, Moss is free to portray many positives within a tirade…
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Film Review: ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’
★★★★★ Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a talismanic work of art, a piece of cinema that reaches through the ages to comment on present needs, wants and perceived existential threats. Even though it has been remade three times (by Philip Kaufman in 1978, Abel Ferrara again in 1993 and finally, for now, Oliver…
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DVD Review: ‘Gomorrah’
★★★★★ Narrative is the base from which elemental passages are forced upon our gaze. In recent years the very idea of watching narratives unfold over 8-12 hours had been the preserve of formalist cinema and its adherents, whether that be the likes of Béla Tarr (Sátántangó (1994), 7h12m) or Lav Diaz (Evolution of a Filipino…
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Film Review: ‘Palo Alto’
★★☆☆☆ Adapted from James Franco’s novel of the same name – a reflection of the hometown ennui he managed to transcend, Palo Alto (2013) is another creative misfire from the talented multi-hyphenate. Franco’s novel is a series of loosely connected vignettes that focuses on a group of teenage high schoolers and their inter personal relationships.…
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Film Review: ‘My Name Is Hmmm’
★★☆☆☆ Agnès B is a created idea from the imagination of Agnès Andrée Marguerite Troublé. Known to the world as a fashion designer she has always held a candle for what the French call the Seventh Art. After embracing cinema and its more errant enfant terrible auteurs, she has made the final leap and created…
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Interview: Bruno Dumont on his ‘Camille Claudel 1915’
French director Bruno Dumont’s Camille Claudel 1915 (2013), which premièred at last year’s Berlin Film Festival, sees Juliette Binoche take the lead as the famous French artist and lover of Auguste Rodin. The main thrust of Dumont’s latest sees Camille placed by her brother, the Catholic poet Paul Claudel (Jean-Luc Vincent), in a remote mental…
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Film Review: ‘Will and Testament’
★★☆☆☆ Skip Kite’s Tony Benn: Will and Testament (2014) is a disappointing piece of Teflon ‘non-cinema’ that may well prove a mystery both to itself and general audiences. Kite claims that cinema is an example of “reverse engineering” and how the “thrill of the ride” is what made him pick film as his art form…
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Film Review: ‘Violette’
★★★☆☆ The American writer Henry Miller once said that he hated writing but he loved having written, and it would seem he had a kindred spirit in the French writer Violette Leduc, who is at the centre of the eponymous new film from director Martin Provost. Leduc was a black marketeer turned celebrated novelist, her…
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Film Review: ‘Still the Enemy Within’
★★★★☆ There are a series of events from a country’s recent past that illuminate with the ferocity of a burning church. The perfect storm of Margaret Thatcher gaining control of the Conservatives, her party’s return to government and a need to cut off the power of the unions all meant that the UK was heading…
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Film Review: ‘Le Jour Se Lève’
★★★★★ There’s bleak and then there’s Le Jour Se Lève (1939). To celebrate the film’s 75th anniversary, this week sees the release of an immaculate 4K restoration along with what the Independent Cinema Office are calling “new previously censored scenes that will be seen by audiences for the very first time.” Easily director Marcel Carné…