Reviews
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Film Review: The Club
★★★★★ Behind the closed doors of the house on the hill lie many secrets. Enveloped in heavy fog, perched above a raging sea, the past sins of four men remain shrouded in mystery. In The Club, Pablo Larraín dives headlong into an evil that Catholicism has long attempted to sweep under the carpet. A physical…
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DVD Review: Shooting Stars
★★★★★ An unbroken crane shot in Shooting Stars‘ opening scene, tracking movie starlet Mae Feather (Annette Benson) as she wanders from her own ground-level film set into the first-floor set of her lover’s, easily matches both Goodfellas‘ restaurant scene and the opening sequence of Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil. It’s an achievement made all the…
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Film Review: Risen
★★★☆☆ From Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves and Waterworld director Kevin Reynolds, Risen provides an alternative viewpoint on the Resurrection and its aftermath. A film that starts out with earnest intentions ends up falling somewhere between a two-thousand-year-old episode of Silent Witness and an educational video R.E. teachers might play to schoolchildren. That’s not to…
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Film Review: The Pearl Button
★★★★☆ With what could be seen as a companion piece to his 2011 documentary Nostalgia for the Light, Chilean director Patricio Guzmán returns to UK cinema screens this year with The Pearl Button. An astoundingly beautiful visual essay which revels in the stunning scenery of Chilean Patagonia, it morphs into a harrowing depiction of the…
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Film Review: Marguerite
★★★☆☆ There certainly ain’t no business like show business. Or amateur operatics for that matter. Eccentric, philanthropic baroness Marguerite Dumont (Catherine Frot) has dedicated her life to music and performing for an entourage of vacuous, superficially adoring high society friends. The fly in the ointment here, however, is that Marguerite is woefully tone-deaf, delusional in…
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Film Review: 10 Cloverfield Lane
★★★☆☆ Holding a mirror to the concerns of contemporary society is a staple of the monster movie. So when Matt Reeves’ Cloverfield arrived on US screens in 2008 it was clear a new breed of monster had emerged to embody the anxieties evoked by the surprise attacks of 9/11. 10 Cloverfield Lane, by debutant director…
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DVD Review: Dolls
★★★★☆ After Hana-Bi and Kikujiro, Dolls is the third and final Blu-ray release from Third Window films in their collection of films by Japanese auteur Takeshi Kitano. Dolls is arguably the strangest of the three films and undoubtedly the most beautiful, with cinematographer Katsumi Yanagijima filling the screen with stunning compositions of colour and motion.…
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Film Review: The Ones Below
★★★☆☆ Keep your friends close and your enemies closer, but what about neighbours? If David Farr’s impressive debut feature The Ones Below is anything to go by, it might be best to avoid them completely. Having previously penned several episodes of Spooks and jointly scripted Joe Wright’s Hanna with Canadian screenwriter Seth Lochhead, the Guildford local tries…
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Film Review: Next to Her
★★★★☆ In the opening shot of Next to Her, impatient teenagers rattle the bars of a metal gate as they wait for Chelli (Liron Ben-Shlush) – the school security guard – to let them out. But it turns out that Chelli is far more trapped than the students behind the gates, because she is the only carer for…
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Film Review: Kung Fu Panda 3
★★★★☆ Kung Fu Panda 3, the last part in DreamWorks Animation’s trilogy (unless another is announced once box office receipts are tallied), puts an end to unlikely hero Po’s adventures in the best possible way, delivering laughs aplenty and the most vibrant animation this year. Po (Jack Black), now a Dragon Warrior, has settled into…