Reviews
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Film Review: Azor
★★★☆☆ Tracking the dealings of a Swiss banker growing increasingly frantic to hang on to lucrative clients spooked by the turmoil, Azor eschews outward thrills or genre intrigue in favour of unspoken dread.
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Film Review: Passing
★★★★☆ The directorial debut of Rebecca Hall, Passing is an intoxicating, dreamlike adaptation of Nella Larsen’s novella of the same name. A deeply personal endeavour for the first-time writer-filmmaker, this tale of race, gender and social mobility in late 1920s New York is told with poise and a softly-spoken fervour.
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Film Review: Wild Indian
★★★☆☆ The past cannot and will not stay buried in Lyle Mitchell Corbine Jr.’s Wild Indian. A tale of generational violence passed down from fathers to sons, it features two young men who share a despicable secret, scarring them for life in ways both struggle to reconcile.
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Film Review: Dune
★★★★☆ Denis Villeneuve returns to the big screen with his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s science fiction epic. Grander in scope than any of Villeneuve’s work yet, Dune is proper, ambitious blockbuster filmmaking for grown-ups.
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Film Review: The French Dispatch
★★★★☆ The French Dispatch of Wes Anderson’s latest film’s title is a fictional magazine, set up by proprietor and editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), a European supplement for a Kansas newspaper owned by his father.
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Film Review: Cryptozoo
★★☆☆☆ Following up his 2016 feature debut My Entire High School Sinking Into the Sea, comic book writer and filmmaker Dash Shaw continues with his quirky style of animation with Cryptozoo, a countercultural-tinted riff on environmentalism.
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Film Review: Never Gonna Snow Again
★★★★☆ All that glitters is not gold, but there is positivity to be found in radioactivity. Co-directed by Małgorzata Szumowska and Michał Englert, the haunting supernatural forces at work in Never Gonna Snow Again are elusive, inexplicable and yet perfectly in sync with reality.
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Film Review: The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão
★★★★☆ Set mainly in 1950s Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian-born filmmaker Karim Aïnouz’s The Invisible Life of Eurídice Gusmão examines the all-encompassing injustices of patriarchy through the story of two sisters’ lifelong dedication to one another.
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Film Review: Ron’s Gone Wrong
★★★☆☆ Only viewers of a certain age will be familiar with the erratic sound of a dial-up modem firing into gear. It’s one of a whole host of pitch-perfect gags that litter new animation Ron’s Gone Wrong, a tender, frequently hilarious tale of unexpected friendships, growing self-assurance and analogue triumph in the digital age. A directorial…
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Film Review: Pier Kids
★★★★☆ Elegance Bratton’s feature debut Pier Kids is a poignant and chaotic study of a community of young black gay men and trans women who congregate at the piers of Hudson River Park, New York City.