Maximilian von Thun
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DVD Review: Where to Invade Next
★★☆☆☆ Where to Invade Next is a collage of Michael Moore’s favourite progressive ideas from across the globe. From generous state-mandated holidays in Italy to debt-free education in Slovenia, Moore picks the policies and practices he believes America should be expropriating for itself – a kind of neo-colonialism the veteran documentarist is more comfortable with…
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DVD Review: Mirror
★★★★☆ Much has been said and written about Andrei Tarkovsky’s highly autobiographical Mirror since it was first released over forty years ago. Yet its imagery and mysticism have by no means lost their power to astound. Tarkovsky possessed a sensibility for, and mastery over, the cinematic form that few directors – before or after –…
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Film Review: Summertime
★★☆☆☆ Summertime is a well-made, well-acted French art-house flick that unfortunately doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say. Veteran director Catherine Corsini’s new film starts off as a promising and energising political thriller about the nascent feminist movement in post-1968 Paris, reminiscent of Olivier Assayas’ excellent Something in the Air. But then it inexplicably degenerates into…
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Interview: Ciro Guerra, dir. Embrace of the Serpent
Colombian auteur Ciro Guerra’s latest film, Embrace of the Serpent, first screened in the Director’s Fortnight section at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival (where it won the CICAE Award) and is the first Colombian film to be nominated for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards. It recounts, through a mixture of fact and…
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Film Review: Mon Roi
★★★★★ On paper, Mon Roi sounds like the simplest of films. A woman meets a man, and they fall in love. They fight a lot, but chemistry keeps them together. They marry and have a child, but divorce because his lifestyle is not adaptable to fatherhood. They continue to see each other over the years,…
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Film Review: Troublemakers: The Story of Land Art
★★★☆☆ In the 1960s, a group of pioneering artists decided to abandon what they saw as the stale and restrictive world of New York’s art galleries for the endless freedom of America’s great outdoors. Leaving behind the spatial limitations of the city, they ventured as far as Nevada, Utah and New Mexico to create artworks…
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Film Review: Mustang
★★★★☆ In Deniz Gamze Ergüven’s debut film Mustang, five young orphaned sisters – Lale (Günes Sensoy), Nur (Doga Zeynep Doguslu), Ece (Elit Iscan), Selma (Tugba Sunguroglu) and Sonay (Ilayda Akdogan) – full of life and natural vigour discover the price of womanhood in a conservative, patriarchal society intent on suppressing it. Present day rural Turkey…
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Film Review: Florence Foster Jenkins
★★☆☆☆ The story of Florence Foster Jenkins is almost too strange to be true. A wealthy New York socialite and passionate patron of the arts, she founded and funded her very own opera club and insisted on being a performer as well an observer, and despite a serious lack of talent went on to sing…
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Film Review: Heaven Knows What
★★★☆☆ We all know that some people take heroin but for most of us it is what “those people” do, a practice beyond the fringes of mainstream society we engage with at a distance – if at all – through the press and stylised media representations. With their latest feature, Heaven Knows What, Josh and…
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Film Review: Eye in the Sky
★★★★☆ It’s one of the most oldest moral dilemmas in the book: if you could save dozens of lives by taking that of an innocent, would you do it? Could you sleep at night, knowing that you were responsible for depriving someone of a future? This conundrum gets a cutting-edge makeover in Eye in the…