Reviews
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DVD Review: Trainwreck
★★★★☆ Viewers fall very willingly and happily into the world of hugely popular American comedian Amy Schumer’s bad girl rom-com Trainwreck (2015). This summer has been dominated by conversations of just how Schumer’s take on contemporary female dating habits are shaking up the genre, providing a biting commentary on how women fall in love on-screen. Trainwreck…
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Blu-ray Review: Murder in the Cathedral
★★★☆☆ When T.S. Eliot consented to an adaptation of his 1935 verse drama Murder in the Cathedral, his vision of the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170, he predicted a “very unusual film”. He wasn’t wrong. George Hoellering’s picture is a cold, austere vision, full of linguistic poetry; undeniably stagy but also packing in moral…
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DVD Review: ‘The Gift’
★★★★☆ Directed by and starring Joel Edgerton, The Gift’s (2015) set-up is simple but effective: Simon (Jason Bateman) and wife Robyn (Rebecca Hall) bump into old school friend Gordon (Edgerton), exchange numbers and are soon sharing dinner and stilted conversation. Before long, Gordon is turning up unannounced and bearing unwanted gifts. It’s a relatable dilemma…
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DVD Review: ‘Czech New Wave: Vol. II’
★★★★☆ Given the very nature of the Czechoslovak New Wave, it may seem obvious to note that certain films focused on the individual’s relationship with the state. In the case of the second volume of Second Run’s collected works from the movement, however, it is a necessity. Comprised of Milos Forman’s A Blonde in Love…
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DVD Review: Aferim!
★★★★☆ Radu Jude’s Everybody in Our Family (2012) was a critically revered, yet criminally little-seen comic satire about the fragile fabric of contemporary Romanian society. Jude’s follow-up Aferim! (2015) marks a noticeably tonal, if not entirely thematic, departure from the intimacy and immediacy of his previous work. Set in the southern Romanian region of Wallachia, in…
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Film Review: Anomalisa
★★★★★ Charlie Kaufman and Duke Jones’ Anomalisa is a deep, witty and moving portrait of alienation filmed in stop-motion animation. It’s quite unlike anything else shown at Venice, or anywhere else for that matter, but if it helps: imagine Aardman Animation doing a Philip K. Dick adaptation. “What is it to be human?” asks Michael…
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Film Review: Sunset Song
★★★★★ Terence Davies is our greatest cinematic poet, yet he has very often struggled bringing projects to the screen. As many directors are well aware, critical acclaim and gushing reviews on release day are simply not enough. Other factors come into play. The business of cinema is neither logical nor sound. It’s something close to…
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Film Review: ‘The Show of Shows’
★★★☆☆ In an act of alchemy thoroughly appropriate to his subject matter, Icelandic director Benedikt Erlingsson manages to be both clear and misty-eyed about the traditions of the circus and vaudeville in new archive documentary The Show of Shows (2015). After the interlocking segments of his wonderful feature debut Of Horses and Men, Erlingsson crafts a…
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Film Review: ‘The Night Before’
★★☆☆☆ Getting the old band back together, Seth Rogen assembles a number of usual suspects for a stocking full of festive Big Apple debauchery in The Night Before (2015). Director Jonathan Levine worked with Rogen and co-star Joseph-Gordon Levitt in the touchingly sincere 50/50, a bromance amidst a fight against cancer. Offering little more than…
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Film Review: ‘The Lesson’
★★★★☆ The most gifted actors are able to convey all emotion and inner anguish with their eyes alone. It’s through the window to the soul of The Lesson’s (2014) protagonist, Nade, that the directorial pairing of Kristina Grozeva and Petar Valchanov – who also penned the script – tell an age-old allegory of right and…