Reviews
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VOD Review: River
★★☆☆☆ First-time filmmaker Jamie M. Dagg directs Rossif Sutherland in this Canadian crime-thriller as American volunteer and doctor John Lake, whose residency at a Laos hospital is cut short after disobeying his superior. He later encounters a sexual assault on a local beach and intervenes, which leads to staggering and life-altering consequences as he attempts to reach the Thai…
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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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Film Review: Precious Cargo
★☆☆☆☆ During the end titles of Precious Cargo we get a close up of some dog muck. It would be nice to think this was a bit of meta-humour or a moment of candid self-awareness from first time director Max Adams, but unfortunately his risible, derivative heist movie has the audacity to actually think it’s…
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Film Review: The Hard Stop
★★★★☆ To open his new documentary The Hard Stop, George Amponsah uses a Martin Luther King quote that acts almost as a catalyst for what follows: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s with a view to providing the unheard with a voice that the filmmaker sought to understand the 2011 London riots…
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Film Review: Ghostbusters
★★★★☆ Paul Feig’s Ghostbusters reboot has already suffered from a pre-release backlash in certain corners of the internet as fans debated whether it could live up to the 1984 original. For many, the idea of meddling with a film so fondly remembered from childhood by a generation who grew up in the 1980s is tantamount…
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Film Review: Weiner
★★★★☆ A fantastic quote from Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan prefaces Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s absorbing campaign documentary Weiner. “The name of a man,” he asserts, “is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.” Its deployment in this particular context could hardly be more apposite; the tragedy of a man driven to build…
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Film Review: Maggie’s Plan
★★★★☆ The Weltanschauung of New York’s upper-middle intelligentsia is almost custom built for a good run- a-round comedy of manners. Rebecca Miller’s latest film, Maggie’s Plan, is one more addition to a considerable canon of light, loving satire that laughs at the pretensions and follies of the over-educated as they luxuriate in so-called ‘high-class problems’.…
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Film Review: A Poem is a Naked Person
★★★★☆ A Poem is a Naked Person is pretty far out, man. In the very loosest sense of the term a documentary biopic of Oklahoma musician Leon Russell, Les Blank’s long-lost film orbits the hirsute, enigmatic singer-songwriter onstage, in the studio and relaxing at home. However, in eschewing effusive talking heads and hagiography this is…
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DVD Review: Grimsby
★★☆☆☆ Sacha Baron Cohen has found fame and notoriety playing out our collective prejudices in living, breathing form, in order to make us realise how untenable they are. Borat’s social satire worked because of its mockumentary form; even as Baron Cohen played a ridiculous Kazakh journalist, he gained some all-too-true reactions from his interview subjects,…
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Film Review: Notes on Blindness
★★★★☆ Cinema may not seem like the natural medium to explore blindness. An art form dominated by images is surely ill-suited to the endeavour of trying to understand what it is like to be without sight. But cinema is memory and in the case of someone who has lost their sight, the idea of flickering…