Festivals
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Venice 2016: The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez review
★★☆☆☆ You know when you buy a new camera, go into the garden to try it out and just snap things to see how the photographs look without necessarily caring what you capture? That’s basically what director Wim Wenders seems to be doing with new film The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez. Beginning with a series…
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Venice 2016: Arrival review
★★★★☆ Premiering at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival has been greatly anticipated. Firstly, the breakout success of last year’s border epic Sicario has whetted appetites to see where the Canadian filmmaker will go next and secondly, because of the prospect of gleaning how Villeneuve will take to science fiction with the prospect…
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Venice 2016: The Light Between Oceans review
★★☆☆☆ “I want to marry a lighthouse keeper. / And live by the side of the sea.” sang Erika Eigan, but according to The Light Between Oceans, the new film from Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, the advice would be: don’t. Michael Fassbender plays Tom Sherbourne, a veteran back from the First World War with a…
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FrightFest 2016: The Similars review
★★★★☆ Like an episode of The Twilight Zone guest-directed by Luis Buñuel, The Similars is richly absurd in premise but also founded on a bedrock of social and political issues. One vital historical reference is the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, the same year in which the film is set, where the army killed protesters in…
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FrightFest 2016: Shelley review
★★★★☆ Ali Abbasi’s striking debut Shelley is a Gothic horror that uses degeneration of the body to explore the exploitation of migrant workers and the individualist ideology that accompanies society’s growing obsession with ‘organic’ living. A young Romanian woman, Elena (Cosmina Stratan), arrives in the Danish countryside to work as a housekeeper for Louise (Ellen…
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FrightFest 2016: Red Christmas review
★★★☆☆ On the colour wheel, Craig Anderson’s Red Christmas is more Bob Clark’s Black Christmas than Michael Curtiz’s White Christmas. While it’s tempting to bring them together as a Yuletide triptych, a ‘Three Colours Christmas’ triple-bill (Krzysztof Kieślowski missed a trick with that one), Anderson’s comic slasher doesn’t quite earn its wings as a potential…
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FrightFest 2016: The Love Witch review
★★★★☆ Anna Biller’s The Love Witch is a movie aesthetes of kitsch will embrace with open arms. Not that the film’s distinct look is mere window-dressing or getting by on camp charm alone. A political work of true authorship if ever there was one, Biller not only directed, she wrote the screenplay, she’s the film’s…
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FrightFest 2016: My Father, Die review
★★★★☆ Revenge is a dish best served over several courses in Sean Brosnan’s brutal redneck noir tale My Father, Die. Full of Old Testament values and punishing degradation, it pits a father and son against each other in skirmishes that go well beyond traditional family rows into the realm of pure Freudian nightmare. Brosnan dedicates…
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FrightFest 2016: Another Evil review
★★★★☆ Ghosts from Our Past: Both Figuratively and Literally, the title of a controversial book co-authored by Erin Gilbert (Kristen Wiig) and Abbey Yates (Melissa McCarthy), in Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters, serves as a handy description of Carson Mell’s superb horror comedy, Another Evil. Vacationing at his mountain cabin property, Dan (an abstract painter) and his…
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FrightFest 2016: Abattoir review
★★★☆☆ Home is where the Abattoir is, in Darren Lynn Bousman’s film noir chiller. Swapping torture porn frolics – he helmed several sequels in the Saw franchise – for a more subdued approach, his latest work, arguably his strongest yet, is pitched as a ghost story with a nightmare twist. Based on an unpublished graphic…