Reviews
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Film Review: Alice Through the Looking Glass
★★★☆☆ Six years on from Tim Burton’s madcap reinvention of the Carroll children’s tales, Mia Wasikowska reprises her role as the enterprising and inquisitive no-longer-so-young lady in Alice Through The Looking Glass. It’s a feast for the eyes, awash with colour and adventure, and there’s a fair amount of humour and rumination on regret, truth-telling…
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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: Money Monster
★☆☆☆☆ Jodie Foster has done her ongoing directorial career no favours with her latest endeavour, Money Monster. It’s impossible to fathom how and why this embarrassingly predictable, poorly performed, woefully scripted, pedestrian thriller received a standing ovation upon its premiere out-of-competition at Cannes. Rising to applaud purely because Julia Roberts and George Clooney are in the…
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Film Review: The Daughter
★★★★☆ A group of old friends sit around a campfire. The mood is one of jovial recollection and reconnection, but as feather-light embers flit away into the night sky secrets lurk in the darkness that envelops them. A meandering tale into the unknown, of long-buried truths, parenthood and troubled filial relationships, The Daughter is a…
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Film Review: The Trust
★☆☆☆☆ The Trust is billed as a crime thriller-cum-black comedy. Unfortunately, this first outing from the brotherly directorial pairing of Alex and Benjamin Brewer is neither thrilling nor funny on any level. Nicolas Cage and Elijah Wood star as crooked Las Vegas cops turned wannabe robbers in a heist movie which is as stagnantly paced…
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Film Review: The Silent Storm
★★☆☆☆ Writer-director Corinna McFarlane’s The Silent Storm is anything but silent. Or nuanced. Or subtle. Set on a remote, nondescript island off the coast of Scotland in the late 1940s, it is a raucous, disjointed cacophony of marital disharmony, community disintegration and tyrannical piety. A gifted British cast, comprising Damian Lewis, Andrea Riseborough and the…
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Film Review: Sing Street
★★★★☆ Once director John Carney returns to his native Dublin for Sing Street, a 1980s-set coming-of-age crowdpleaser with real depth, heart and wit to match its toe-tapping musical beats. Conor (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a 14-year-old kid who’s forced to move from a private school to rowdy public one run by the Christian Brothers when his parents…
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Film Review: Chicken
★★★★☆ In an age of Marvel multiplex hegemony, Chicken – from London-based filmmaker Joe Stephenson – is the kind of low-budget British indie which restores faith in cinema as a means of genuine storytelling with well-rounded, engaging characters. Receiving a glowing endorsement from none other than Sir Ian McKellen, this debut feature needs no further…
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Film Review: A Hologram for the King
★★☆☆☆ You may find yourself with a weak script, borrowing cultural currency from a song written over thirty years ago, shooting a film, in another part of the world, and you may ask yourself: ‘Well, why did they make this?’ In the case of A Hologram for the King, the answer is pretty straightforward –…
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DVD Review: Hired to Kill
★★☆☆☆ Hired to Kill, the cult film from notorious Greek director, disgraced journalist and purveyor of bottom- of-the-barrel trash TV, Nico Mastorakis, cannot, for most viewers, be recommended in good conscience. A bargain bin clone of 1985’s Commando, Hired to Kill boasts performances bad enough to make even Arnie wince, forgettable action, and a ludicrous…