Patrick Gamble
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Berlin 2018: Yardie review
★★★☆☆ Hackney-born actor, DJ and now filmmaker Idris Elba makes his directorial debut with Yardie, a Caribbean twist on the well-worn conventions of the British gangster movie, based on the book by Victor Headley. The film follows a Jamaican drug courier called D (Aml Ameen) who leaves the gang violence of Kingston, Jamaica only to…
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Film Review: Madeline’s Madeline
★★★★☆ Acclaimed independent filmmaker Josephine Decker (Butter on the Latch, Thou Wast Mild and Lovely) returns to UK cinemas with Madeline’s Madeline, a visionary study of the analogy between creativity and insanity. Acting requires pulling oneself inside-out psychologically and blurring the lines between personal and imagined experiences. It’s something Madeline (Helena Howard), the young biracial…
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Film Review: Unsane
★★★☆☆ In light of the recent allegations of sexual harassment aimed squarely at the film industry, Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane – an i-Phone shot thriller about a woman pushed to the precipice of a mental breakdown – is a surprisingly shallow slice of schlock cinema. “I always liked you in blue,” a tender voiceover calmly announces…
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Berlin 2018: Victory Day review
★★★☆☆ Training his eye on the 2017 memorial service held at Berlin’s Treptower Park, a site of pilgrimage for the Soviet diaspora, Sergei Loznitsa’s Victory Day is an absorbing study of nationalism and the collective memory of traumatic experiences. After the Second World War ended, and Berlin was divided up into Soviet, American, British and French zones…
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Berlin 2018: Yours in Sisterhood review
★★★☆☆ A series of provocative and often heartbreaking conversations between the past and the present, Irene Lusztig’s Yours in Sisterhood is a collective portrait of feminism, and a beautiful paean to the lost art of letter writing. Beginning as an insert in New York Magazine, before becoming the first ever mainstream feminist magazine in the US,…
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Berlin 2018: An Elephant Sitting Still review
★★★★☆ Powerfully conveying a longing for escape from ordinary life, Hu Bo’s An Elephant Sitting Still is a strangely alluring, four-hour portrait of the disillusionment and hollow sense of emptiness experienced by those living in a society marked by violent individualism. Under the perpetually grey sky of a run-down industrial town in northern China, Hu…
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Berlin 2018: Lemonade review
★★★★☆ The theme of institutional corruption has become recognised as a mainstay of the Romanian New Wave, but Ioana Uricaru’s debut Lemonade, the story of a Romanian woman’s attempt to obtain a United States green card, suggests things aren’t much better in the ‘Land of the Free’. Arriving almost a decade after her contribution to…
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Berlin 2018: The Green Fog review
★★★★☆ A veritable treasure trove for cinephiliacs, The Green Fog sees Guy Maddin and his Forbidden Room team use footage repurposed from movies and television shows shot or set exclusively in San Francisco to create a cinematic echo of Alfred Hitchcock’s classic thriller Vertigo. Commissioned by the San Francisco International Film Festival, but born out of…
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Film Review: Die Tomorrow
★★★★☆ If you found out you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do? Cinema has often looked to stories of the dead as a way of making sense of the living, but rarely do we ever choose to confront our own mortality head-on. Not Thai director Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit, whose Die Tomorrow merges various…
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Berlin 2018: Daughter of Mine review
★★★★☆ While it can be frustrating to see female characters defined by their reproductive capabilities and adherence to societal norms, some of cinema’s most complex and memorable women have been mothers. That’s certainly the case in Laura Bispuri’s Daughter of Mine, a deeply felt study of motherhood focused on a young Sardinian girl torn between the…