Festivals
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Czech100: Our picks of the festival
To mark the centenary of the Czech Republic’s independence, the Czech100 Festival runs from 28 October to the 9 December, a celebration of Czech art, design, fashion, theatre and of course film. The Made in Prague film strand of the festival runs from 2-4 November. Fans of the 1996 film Kolya, which won the Academy Award for…
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MAMI 2018: Hotel by the River review
★★★☆☆ Shot in muted black and white, South Korean director Hong Sang-soo’s Hotel by the River lets two stories – one about a poet getting ready to die and the other about a woman recovering from heartbreak – unfold gently through idle conversations against a winter setting. At one point in Hotel by the River, an aging father explains to his two…
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MAMI 2018: Our picks of the festival
With the 20th edition of the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival with Star well underway, film professionals and cinema lovers flock to theatres across the city to get a taste of some of the year’s best international and regional fare. Vasan Bala’s Mard Ko Dard Nahi Hota (The Man Who Feels No Pain) which premiered…
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#LFF 2018: Stan & Ollie review
★★★☆☆ Inspired by the book Laurel and Hardy: The British Tours by A.J. Marriot, who also featured as a consultant on the film, Jon S. Baird’s Stan & Ollie is part biography and part homage to Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, arguably the greatest stage and screen comedy performers of their time. Opening mid-shoot on a…
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#LFF 2018: Can You Ever Forgive Me? review
★★★☆☆ In the 1990s, biographer Lee Israel (Melissa McCarthy), frustrated with lack of interest in a mooted project about vaudeville legend Fanny Brice, and struggling with money and alcohol issues, began a spree of literary forgery that amounted to over 400 faked letters. Melissa McCarthy has quietly been on a real bum streak of late…
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#LFF 2018: Sew the Winter to My Skin review
★★★★☆ Hiding out in a cave for around a decade, legendary South African outlaw John Kepe (here played with unhinged momentum by Ezra Mabengeza) rustled sheep and terrorised white landowners until he was caught and hanged in 1952. In Sew the Winter to My Skin, writer-director Jahmil X. T. Qubeka uses western tropes to mythologise…
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#LFF 2018: Assassination Nation review
★★★☆☆ Assassination Nation plugs America and the age of social media full of bullet holes until the gun goes click. The problem with this mode of cinematic attack is it leaves a lot of splatter and mess. A comic strip bat-shit crazy, Sam Levinson’s film is a declaration of war against the social and political…
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#LFF 2018: All the Gods in the Sky review
★★★★☆ Things have been quiet on the French Extremity front in recent times, but fear not! A director calling himself ‘Quarxx’ has brought the controversial brand of European cinema back with a cosmic-horror bang via new film All the Gods in the Sky. From its opening shots of a factory floor manufacturing sheet metal and the…
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#LFF 2018: The Nightshifter review
★★★☆☆ In Dennison Ramalho’s phantasmagorical morality tale The Nightshifter, a cuckolded coroner’s assistant with the ability to communicate with the recently departed takes revenge against his wife and her lover, in turn unleashing a living nightmare upon himself and his two kids. Stênio (Daniel de Oliveira) is an absent father and husband. In early scenes,…
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#LFF 2018: Happy New Year, Colin Burstead review
★★★★☆ Down Terrace director Ben Wheatley returns to the horror of kinship with Happy New Year, Colin Burstead (working title Colin You Anus), which received its world premiere at this year’s London Film Festival. The film stars Wheatley regular Neil Maskell – in a career-best performance – as the titular Colin/anus, an unremarkable everyman desperate to unite…