Reviews
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Film Review: Morgan
★★★☆☆ Ridley Scott’s influence weighs heavily on the concept and themes of Morgan, the debut feature by his son, Luke. The premise – scientists create a part-clone, part-android cybernetic being – is pure Blade Runner, and the small cast and paranoid claustrophobia of the remote setting consciously invokes Alien. Even corporate interloper Lee Weathers’ (Kate…
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Film Review: The Land of the Enlightened
★★★☆☆ In this his debut film, Belgian photographer Pieter-Jan De Pue blends fiction and documentary to locate a deeper truth in Afghanistan’s tortured history of invasion and occupation. A cinematic voyage across the arid Afghan hinterlands, The Land of the Enlightened tells the story of a group of young boys whose lives have been forever…
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Film Review: Kubo and the Two Strings
★★★★☆ A young boy with a magical shamisen and a penchant for origami may not seem like the obvious choice to head a sweeping adventure story but that’s precisely who leads the charge in Laika’s beautiful new stop-motion animation Kubo and the Two Strings. Take a step back, though, and it makes perfect sense. The…
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Film Review: Hell or High Water
★★☆☆☆ Despite receiving near-unanimous praise upon its release in the US, Hell or High Water doesn’t do much particularly well, and it does a lot of things quite badly. Perhaps that is an indication of how low the stock of American action films has fallen in recent years. It is a predictable story of two…
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Film Review: Captain Fantastic
★★★☆☆ Living out in the woods, cabin schooling your children and strict SAS-style survival regimes constitute an unorthodox existence. But with its championing of independent thought, outside the box parenting and fervent anti-establishment ethos Captain Fantastic may just convince you it’s a worthwhile idea. More Fantastic Mr. Fox than Captain America, it is a quirky,…
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Film Review: The Blue Room
★★★★☆ Set in a provincial town in the great rural expanses of western France, there’s a debilitating claustrophobia to Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room, a tightly coiled retelling of the 1964 Georges Simenon novel. Surrounded by verdant fields and miles of open road, with seclusion comes isolation, and lashings of heavy rain. It is seduction that…
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Film Review: Ben-Hur
★★★☆☆ A long time ago, in a pre-Christian moral universe far far away, there were two brothers. One a Jewish prince, the other a Roman orphan. Their cultural differences could usher in a new era of toleration and understanding for their home town of Jerusalem, or it could lead them to tool up with chariots…
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Film Review: Anthropoid
★★★☆☆ The resistance is not just against Nazi occupation in Sean Ellis’ new Prague-set thriller Anthropoid, but against excess. “This is not a game,” snarls Cillian Murphy’s Josef Gabčík when the female companions of he and partner Jan Kubiš (Jamie Dornan) get dolled up for a night in a dancehall, drawing the unwanted attention of…
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Film Review: A Woman’s Life
★★★☆☆ Following hot on the heels of the Cannes prize winner The Measure of a Man, French director Stéphane Brizé returns with his adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, A Woman’s Life. The woman in question is Jeanne (Judith Chemla), the only daughter of wealthy aristocracy. Her father is the Baron (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and…
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Film Review: Things to Come
★★★☆☆ Mia Hansen-Løve’s fifth feature, Things to Come, is an introspective exploration of a woman losing her moorings and facing up to old age. Isabelle Huppert plays Nathalie, a high school philosophy teacher. When Heinz (André Marcon), her husband of twenty-five years, also a philosophy lecturer, admits he has met someone else, she asks “Why…