Reviews
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Film Review: The 33
★★★☆☆ In an age of minute-by-minute global news coverage, Twitter feeds and anchors can be heard the frantic tapping of a screenwriter’s laptop keys. Five years have passed since the collapse of an Atacama Desert mine trapped 32 Chileans and one Bolivian underground for 69 days and it is perhaps surprising that the film…
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Blu-ray: What Have You Done to Solange?
★★★★★ Arrow Video continue to impress with their superb run of Blu-ray releases, this time with Massimo Dallamano’s classic giallo What Have You Done to Solange? (1972). Enrico (Fabio Testi) is a charismatic but sleazy teacher at an English Catholic girl’s school, engaged in an ill-advised affair with one of his students, Elizabeth (Cristian Galbo). In…
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DVD Review: Paper Towns
★★★☆☆ Last year, weepy romance The Fault in Our Stars (2014) in tandem with Divergent (2014) launched its leads, Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, to stardom. Paper Towns (2015), based on another novel by John Green, author of Fault, is a slightly different prospect, straddling the boundaries between the classic American High School Movie and…
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Film Review: When Harry Met Sally
★★★★★ Has the form of the romantic comedy ever been more perfectly expressed than in When Harry Met Sally (1989), rereleased in UK cinemas just in time for Christmas? Rob Reiner’s film might not have been the first rom-com, but taking their cue from It Happened One Night (1934) and the screwball comedies of the…
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Film Review: Swung
★★★☆☆ Even if innocently weighing up the virtues of a vegetable patch, discussing one’s ability, or indeed inability, to grow a carrot when issues are being had in the bedroom department is a thinly disguised euphemism at best. Erectile dysfunction is not something the British male wants to talk about, plain and simple, but talk…
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Film Review: Peggy Guggenheim
★★★☆☆ Scion to one of America’s great families, the Guggenheims, Peggy – daughter of Benjamin, the multimillionaire who famously sank with the Titanic, smoking a stogie and having a nip of brandy has ice-cold Atlantic water deluged the stricken boat – became famous in her own right for a mighty art collection and ‘discovering’ Jackson…
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Film Review: Ice and the Sky
★★★☆☆ It’s testament to an overdue and definitive shift to mainstream debate that a documentary on climate change was chosen to close this year’s Cannes Film Festival. A decade on from the cuddly tale of monogamy and perseverance that was March of the Penguins (2005), Luc Jacquet again returns to the Antarctic. Much like the…
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Film Review: Hector
★★★★☆ Hector, a heartfelt road movie driven by a tremendous performance from Ken Loach regular Peter Mullan, is an assured debut feature from writer-director Jake Gavin. The photojournalist turned filmmaker lovingly constructs the tale of homeless nomad ‘Hec’ who, estranged from his family in Glasgow, has roamed the UK’s highways and byways for nearly fifteen…
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Film Review: Grandma
★★★☆☆ Lily Tomlin’s hot streak continues in her golden years as she tackles the titular role in Grandma (2015). As Elle Reid, Tomlin is a feisty lesbian matriarch helping her granddaughter collect funds for her impending abortion. Part road movie, part ethics play, all heartwarming comedy, writer-director Paul Weitz (About a Boy, Admission) brings to…
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Film Review: The Forbidden Room
★★★★☆ Do you believe in the power of pure befuddlement? If you do then prepare for some festive deranging because Guy Maddin’s latest film is entering theatres as a non-populist antidote to slightly sweeter seasonal fare. The Forbidden Room (2015) is a comic, mystical melodrama that will puzzle your socks off and then return them…