Patrick Gamble
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Berlin 2018: The Prayer review
★★★☆☆ A film about faith in all its various forms, Cédric Kahn’s The Prayer is a sobering drama about the fragility of the human spirit, interwoven with a dollop of biblical abstinence. Thomas (Anthony Bajon) is a junkie. That’s about as much as we know about him when he arrives at a remote community in…
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Film Review: Transit
★★☆☆☆ In Phoenix, Christian Petzold’s haunting tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, the German director offered a fresh twist on the mistaken identity sub-genre and explored how war changes personal and national identities. In his Berlinale-premiering follow-up, Transit, identity is once again key. Based on Anna Seghers’ eponymous novel – an existential thriller about the experiences…
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Berlin 2018: Stateless review
★★★☆☆ “Only the sun can cross borders without soldiers firing at it.” This quote, from Hénia (El Ghalia Ben Zaouia), the protagonist of Narjiss Nejjar’s eminently political film Stateless, only really resonates after we learn that she is one of the 45,000 families – about 500,000 people – who were ruthlessly expelled in December 1975…
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Berlin 2018: Dovlatov review
★★★☆☆ If a novel is written but there’s no one there to read it does it even exist? What it means to exist in a world without creative freedom is central to Alexey German Jr’s Dovlatov, a film that circles around and threads through the life of Russian-Jewish writer Sergei Dovlatov. Dovlatov once said “There’s…
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Berlin 2018: Damsel review
★★☆☆☆ Following on from the critical admiration he received for his starring turn in The Safdie brothers’ Good Time, Robert Pattinson finds himself in front of another sibling duo’s camera in David and Nathan Zellner’s Damsel, an off-kilter western about misplaced love that whilst not without its pleasures, ultimately struggles to overcome its abundance of…
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Berlin 2018: The Heiresses review
★★★★☆ In opposition to other typically comical stories of later-life affirmation, Marcelo Martinessi’s The Heiresses is a film brooding with melancholy and a sense of loss. A story about losing and finding romance but choosing independence instead, this deeply felt Paraguayan drama shines a light on the nation’s fractured identity by crossing numerous generational and class…
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Berlin 2018: Our picks of the programme
The 68th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival kicks off today with Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. A return to the stop-motion animation the American auteur employed in his quirky re-imagining of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox, Anderson’s latest may sound like an incongruous choice to open a festival that prides itself on its…
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Film Review: Song of Granite
★★★★★ Combining dramatic re-creation with musical performances, Ireland’s foreign-language Oscar entry Song of Granite is a lyrical paean to Gaelic culture and the ability of music to colour the distance between the past and present. In 2012, Pat Collins received critical acclaim for Silence, his cinematic ode to the soundscapes of the Irish countryside. Following…
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Film Review: Félicité
★★★☆☆ Félicité marks a return to screens for Senegalese director Alain Gomis. A graceful and deeply sympathetic piece of work about a Congolese bar singer and her attempts to raise enough money for an operation for her teenage son, Félicité is an emotionally effective heart-tugger, thanks largely to Véro Tshanda Beya’s dignified lead performance. When…
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Film Review: Call Me by Your Name
★★★★★ Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name completes the Italian director’s trilogy of desire. Based on the novel of the same name by André Aciman, this luxurious coming-of-age tale is a portrait of youthful infatuation complete with its highs and lows.Guadagnino’s latest recounts a summer romance in 1980s Northern Italy between a precocious 17-year-old…