Reviews
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Film Review: Pacifiction
★★★★☆ In French Polynesia, High Commissioner De Roller (Benoît Magimel) manages the delicate tensions between islanders and the establishment, moving through society’s strata. Writer-director Albert Serra’s latest is a hazy fever dream of post-colonialist politics and ambition that, in its final minutes, lurches into apocalyptic mania.
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Film Review: How to Blow Up a Pipeline
★★★★☆ A sense of powerlessness is often described as a root cause of climate-anxiety, and it seems inevitable that such negative energy would have an equal and opposite: dreams of drastic action. How to Blow Up a Pipeline is a ‘what if’ film about targeting carbon infrastructure, dressed with the contours of a heist movie…
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Film Review: One Fine Morning
★★★★☆ Can love sustain in a relationship if it is not reciprocal; indeed is such a thing even love? With One Fine Morning, celebrated French director Mia Hansen-Løve presents complementary accounts of infatuation, love, and loss in a nuanced, moving study of the ways that love can sustain and consume us.
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Film Review: Three Colours Trilogy
★★★★★ Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy stars Juliette Binoche, Julie Delpy and Irene Jacob in three of the most revered pieces of European cinema ever made. Named after the colours of the French flag (Blue, White and Red), the films are loosely based on the three political ideals of the French Republic; Liberty, Equality and…
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Film Review: Raging Bull
★★★★★ A sporting biopic unlike any other, Martin Scorsese’s astonishing masterpiece Raging Bull is surely one of the greatest cinematic achievements of all time. Although many rightly claim it to be the greatest sports movie of all time, Raging Bull’s praise should not merely be confined to one genre, as it is unquestionably one of…
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Film Review: Godland
★★★★★ Sent on a mission to establish a parish in a remote Icelandic settlement, Danish priest Lucas (Elliott Crosset Hove) must brave harsh conditions, strange customs and existential dread in Hlynur Pálmason’s 19th century Nordic epic. Godland is the Icelandic director’s most accomplished work to date.
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Film Review: Please Baby Please
★★★★★ Filmmaker Amanda Kramer’s latest is a surreal, erotic, and often romantic vision of nonconformity shot through the lens of classic Hollywood and inspired by the cinema of Kenneth Anger. In politics and the media, opportunistic hate-mongers whip up bigotry against gender non-conformity, while everyone in contemporary cinema is beautiful but no one is horny.
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Film Review: God’s Creatures
★★★★★ Saela Davis and Anna Rose Holmer are a little-known writing and directing partnership based in Brooklyn, New York. But their standing is due a considerable elevation on the strength of God’s Creatures, a film that wields its simple premise with devastating impact.
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Film Review: 1976
★★★★☆ Putting her talents behind the camera, Chilean actor-turned-director Manuela Martelli’s debut feature is a gripping study of paranoia during the early years of the Pinochet regime. As historical noir, Martelli’s film is thrilling, but as a document of the comforts of complicity and the terror of resistance, 1976 is visceral.
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Film Review: Infinity Pool
★★★★☆ Having horrified audiences most recently with 2020’s Possessor, Brandon Cronenberg – son of David – is about to make an even bigger arterial splash with Infinity Pool, a lysergic hymn to ritual bloodletting and spoilt Westerners who enjoy languorous holidays in other people’s misery. The film stars Alexander Skarsgård and Mia Goth.