Tom Duggins
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Film Review: Passengers
★★★☆☆ If you’ve ever been stuck in an airport lounge, motorway service station or transit hub hotel, you might feel a sceptical appreciation for Passengers, the latest film from director Morten Tyldum (Headhunters, The Imitation Game). Aboard an intergalactic shuttle, powered by the incredible star power of Michael Sheen, Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt and Laurence…
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Film Review: The Light Between Oceans
★★☆☆☆ Ah, the lighthouse: visual metaphor of masculine vanity, anti-shipwreck device, and home to a solitary lighthouse keeper, desperate for company to keep him from his own thoughts. Sound romantic and, perhaps, sigh-inducing to you? Maybe a good setting for a nice romance? Well such was the thought of M.L. Stedman, writer of the popular…
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DVD Review: The Lion in Winter
★★★★☆ Those who jones for Thrones are in luck – sort of. If Medieval intrigue is your thing, and you don’t mind a substitution of straight-up fantasy for historical fantasy, then your next dose of royal jockeying and primogenitive treachery is coming gift-wrapped in time for winter, thanks to StudioCanal’s restored release of The Lion…
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Film Review: Ben-Hur
★★★☆☆ A long time ago, in a pre-Christian moral universe far far away, there were two brothers. One a Jewish prince, the other a Roman orphan. Their cultural differences could usher in a new era of toleration and understanding for their home town of Jerusalem, or it could lead them to tool up with chariots…
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Film Review: David Brent: Life on the Road
★★★☆☆ It may not come as too much of a surprise to learn that David Brent can’t quite carry an entire feature film all on his own – but there’s humour enough in Life on the Road to justify the project, even if it falls considerably short of the ensemble excellence that made The Office…
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Film Review: Wiener-Dog
★★★★☆ If you’re in the business of selling dog food, you’ll know that dog owners are in the habit of projecting their own personality onto their precious pooches. What then, does a Wiener-Dog have to say about its owner? Hell, what does a dog resembling a frankfurter have to say about life, death, addiction and…
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Film Review: Star Trek Beyond
★☆☆☆☆ If you go out into the furthest reaches of Star Trek’s filmography you’ll be in for an unsettling discovery – the final frontier looks oddly familiar. It’s brightly coloured eye-bait, Jim, exactly as we know it – outpacing your visual field in an attempt to convince you that something exciting is going on. A…
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Film Review: Maggie’s Plan
★★★★☆ The Weltanschauung of New York’s upper-middle intelligentsia is almost custom built for a good run- a-round comedy of manners. Rebecca Miller’s latest film, Maggie’s Plan, is one more addition to a considerable canon of light, loving satire that laughs at the pretensions and follies of the over-educated as they luxuriate in so-called ‘high-class problems’.…
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DVD Review: Edvard Munch
★★★☆☆ Edvard Munch’s paintings were critically savaged in his lifetime. His preference for personal expression over natural representation shocked an art world not yet ready to peer inside the mind of a man racked with dread and anxiety. This is the core message of Peter Watkins’ Edvard Munch – a film which is unflinchingly bleak,…
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Film Review: A Hologram for the King
★★☆☆☆ You may find yourself with a weak script, borrowing cultural currency from a song written over thirty years ago, shooting a film, in another part of the world, and you may ask yourself: ‘Well, why did they make this?’ In the case of A Hologram for the King, the answer is pretty straightforward –…