Festivals
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FrightFest 2020: There’s No Such Thing as Vampires review
★★☆☆☆ Brought together at random by a car crash in the middle of the night, twentysomething Ariel (Emma Holzer) is thrown headfirst into a nightmare as she helps a mysterious man named Joshua (Josh Plasse) escape the attentions of a malevolent supernatural being. Logan Thomas’ There’s No Such Thing as Vampires is a movie arguably too…
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FrightFest 2020: Programme highlights
With Covid-19 still a global threat, festival organisers have been pushed to making crucial decisions: Cancel or opt for an online edition? While a few hardy festivals, such as Venice, have announced the show must go on, at least in some form, others have decided the online option is more viable and infinitely safer. FrightFest,…
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BFI Flare 2020: A Dog Barking at the Moon review
★★★★☆ The seismic psychological ripples of China’s one-child policy – so recently and wonderfully explored in Wang Xiaoshuai’s So Long, My Son – are keenly felt in this curiously titled and boldly played family drama. At the heart of this domestic narrative is a fractious, decade-spanning relationship between a mother and daughter. Xiang Zi’s A Dog…
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CPH:DOX 2020: The Fight for Greenland review
★★★☆☆ The opening film of this year’s digitised CPH:DOX festival, Kenneth Sorento’s The Fight for Greenland offers a balanced, clear-eyed view of an indigenous populace grappling with the prospect of autonomy from the Kingdom of Denmark.
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CPH:DOX 2020: Digital programme preview
With the Cannes Film Festival now postponing its 2020 edition in light of the global Covid-19 epidemic until late June at the earliest, and other major fests either cancelling or delaying in recent weeks, CPH:DOX has arguably led the way in adapting to the current situation.
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Cinema Made in Italy 2020 highlights
Celebrating its tenth anniversary, Cinema Made in Italy returned to London this month to showcase a surfeit of contemporary Italian cinema. New films were screened from 4-9 March, in addition to a special screening of Liliana Cavani’s 1974 psychological erotic classic, The Night Porter. Cinema Made in Italy took place at the Ciné Lumière, hosted by…
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Tallinn 2019: Our festival highlights
The 23rd Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) yesterday crowned Anshul Chauhan’s Japanese father and daughter tale Kontora as the Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Filippino filmmaker Jun Robles Jana for Kalel (15), a portrait of a 15-year-old teen in Manila.
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#LFF 2019: The El Duce Tapes review
★★★★☆ The El Duce Tapes is one of the best music docs to come along in a while. Funny, honest, grotesque and fascinated by a pot-bellied miscreant most would run a mile from, the film is a thought-provoking foray into anti-commercial art and outsider lifestyles. You might have seen Eldon Hoke before. The musician made…
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#LFF 2019: Greed review
★★☆☆☆ Michael Winterbottom reunites with his perennial stars Steve Coogan and Shirley Henderson for a satire of the superrich set in the days running up to a lavish 60th birthday party in Mykonos. Coogan plays Sir Richard McCreadie, a clear pastiche of Philip Green that skims just wide enough of biography to keep the film…
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#LFF 2019: Blackbird review
★★★★☆ Set around a vast estate on the northeast American coast, in Roger Michell’s Blackbird, a family comes together over one last weekend to say their goodbyes to matriarch Lily (Susan Sarandon). Lily has a terminal illness which causes such physical deterioration that her body will eventually shut down entirely, leaving her unable to even…