Reviews
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Film Review: Deerskin
★★★★☆ Absurdity and surrealism played with a straight face is Quentin Dupieux’s stock in trade. His latest gonzo reverie Deerskin finds the filmmaker working with major stars Jean Dujardin and Adèle Haenel. The result is predictably crackpot and enigmatic. We meet Georges (Dujardin) driving down the motorway in a corduroy blazer. At a service station, he…
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Film Review: The Truffle Hunters
★★★★☆ A beautiful wide shot of a lush, rain soaked forest painted in deep greens and browns fills the frame. As the camera slowly pushes in, several figures emerge from the morass of leaves and vines: a man and his dogs, slowly making their way through the undergrowth. The man is one of Piedmont’s famous…
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Film Review: Martin Eden
★★★★☆ There’s only one thing sadder than the fate of a failed writer and that’s the fate of a successful writer. That’s the lesson this reviewer took home from Pietro Marcello’s bold interpretation of Jack London’s Martin Eden. The film transfers London’s semi-autobiographical hero from Oregon to Naples in a period that seems to span…
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Film Review: Jumbo
★★☆☆☆ Close encounters of an unusual kind shake Jeanne (Noémie Merlant) to her core in Zoé Wittock’s debut feature Jumbo. With the ground literally trembling beneath her feet, strange sounds and sensations take hold at an amusement park where the sparks of sexual awakening in the timid young woman begin to fly. As is the…
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Film Review: Last Man Standing: Suge Knight and the Murders of Biggie & Tupac
★★★★☆ The murder of Tupac Shakur in 1996, and the subsequent killing of Biggie Smalls the following year, are so important to the history of hip hop – the former inspiring a thousand conspiracy theories – that it is fair to describe them as mythic. Returning to the scene of his 2002 documentary, Biggie &…
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Film Review: Another Round
★★★☆☆ Eight years after The Hunt, Thomas Vinterberg gets the old band back together for a rollicking good time in Another Round. Necking half-a-bottle of Smirnoff before starting a day of work would generally be considered grounds for a pretty serious intervention. But Martin (Mads Mikkelsen) will soon be having the time of his life.…
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Film Review: Sweat
★★★★☆ Swedish director Magnus von Horn follows up his 2015 feature debut The Here After with Sweat, depicting three days in the life of an Instagram influencer. Structured in parts like a thriller, Sweat is truly most successful as a character study, while its representation of social media gives rise to a nuanced understanding of…
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Film Review: Ultraviolence
★★★★★ “They actually have the ability to…to kill. And they’re not sanctioned for it, in any way.” When police officers commit murder with impunity, what possible course of action can be taken by devastated families? When the CPS and IPCC conduct sham investigations, more to save face and keep the lid on cover-ups than to…
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Film Review: Supernova
★★★★☆ Full to the brim with sharp wit, emotional sincerity and overflowing with love, Supernova sees the star power of Colin Firth and Stanley Tucci align. Harry Macqueen’s sophomore feature is a slender, pitch-perfect human drama, whose script, direction and arguably career-best performances combine to heart-rending effect. By no means the first exploration of dementia…
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Film Review: Nashville
★★★★★ “No politics. No government. No nothing!” Remove these elements from any American film set or produced amid the anger, disenchantment and paranoia of the mid-1970s, and what remains? The answer is either a large great white shark or a tongue-in-cheek ode to the birthplace of country and western music However, given a full 4K…