Reviews
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Film Review: ‘Letters to Max’
★★★☆☆ How to solve a problem like Abkhazia? Or rather, how to send a letter from Paris to a country that has not yet been acknowledged by the French state? Documentary filmmaker Eric Baudelaire again chooses the epistolary form in Letters to Max (2014) after employing a series of email exchanges to structure his first…
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Film Review: ‘Fidelio: Alice’s Journey’
★★★☆☆ The ironic naming of the cargo ship that director Lucie Borleteau uses in Fidelio: Alice’s Journey (2014) comes into view as the ‘Fidelio’ departs the port of Marseille for the first time. Employed as the literal and figurative vessel for the emotional and spiritual odyssey undertaken by the film’s eponymous voyager (Ariane Labed) it…
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Film Review: ‘By Our Selves’
★★☆☆☆ “John Clare was a minor nature poet, who went mad,” voices repeat as a challenging refrain throughout Andrew Kötting’s By Our Selves (2015), a barmy reconstruction of a four-day walk/escapade that Clare took from the asylum near Epping Forest, where he was confined, heading for Helpston in Northamptonshire. Toby Jones has the thankless task…
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DVD Review: ‘Spooks’
★★☆☆☆ In a grey, rainy London, hued blue to add further sombre foreboding, the indomitable Harry Pearce (Peter Firth) finds himself in a familiar position: watching an op go south via screens in a new and improved Thames House, stuck between a rock and a hard place. Bharat Nalluri – who directed half a dozen…
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DVD Review: ‘P’tit Quinquin’
★★★★☆ French filmmaker Bruno Dumont is a director strongly associated with serious, spiritual, and metaphysical European arthouse. What a surprise it was, then, when his latest project was announced as not only being a first foray into the world of long-form television, but a comedy to boot. The result is the four part mini-series, P’tit…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Otto Preminger Noir Collection’
★★★★★ Alongside Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, and John Huston, Otto Preminger was one of the most influential film noir directors in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. This new collection by the BFI gives us three of his finest works, namely Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1949) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950). The collection itself…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Night and the City’
★★★★★ Adapted from Gerald Kersh’s 1938 novel, which at the time warned readers that it featured a story “not for the strait-laced or squeamish, but for those willing to taste it, a treat of rare substance”, Night and the City (1950) postmarked the end of the gloom-ridden cinema of the forties as something of an…
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DVD Review: ‘Leave to Remain’
★★★★☆ Bruce Goodison’s impressive feature Leave to Remain (2013) confronts the issue of teenage asylum seekers struggling to adapt to life in London and dealing with past trauma as they wait for their permanent leave to remain. In Britain, unaccompanied minors are granted temporary asylum and are placed in foster homes or shelters. But when…
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DVD Review: ‘Anarchy’
★★☆☆☆ Belonging to that wonky sub-genre of William Shakespeare’s commonly works known as the ‘problem plays’, Michael Almereyda’s Anarchy (2014) is an intriguingly off-the-wall production which ultimately doesn’t quite gel. Cymbeline (Ed Harris) of the Briton Motorcycle Club goes to war with the Roman police department headed by Caius Lucius (Vondie Curtis-Hall). Meanwhile, his second…
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DVD Review: ’52 Tuesdays’
★★★☆☆ The writer and director of 52 Tuesdays (2013), Sophie Hyde, must be commended for her sticking to the challenging rules that she set herself. The film was shot strictly on every Tuesday for a year, to the point that when one character takes a brief trip to San Francisco they still made sure that…