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Film Review: My Pure Land
★★★★☆ Offering a rarely-seen perspective on Pakistan – particularly in the West – Sarmad Masud’s My Pure Land could be described as a ‘feminist western’, but it is richer and deeper, both politically and psychologically, than the genre usually allows.Based on a true story, teenager Nazo Dharejo (Suhaee Abro), alongside her mother Waderi Jamzadi, and…
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Film Review: Mother!
★★★★★ Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky returns to cinema screens with Mother!, an utterly insane film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, which begins as a haunted house tale before transforming into an allegorical journey.Aronofsky has always been a filmmaker who has lived on the edge between the profound and…
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Toronto 2017: Breathe review
★★★☆☆ At the age of 28, Robert Cavendish was paralysed from the neck down by polio. Given only months to live on a respirator, he beat the odds and became one of the longest living ‘responauts’. Andy Serkis takes on Cavendish’s story with biopic Breathe.Opening with Cavendish (Andrew Garfield) meeting his future wife Diana (Claire…
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Film Review: Unicorn Store
★★★★☆ Debut director Brie Larson tackles millennial growing pains in Unicorn Store, a super sweet, affecting comedy with a magical premise and a terrific central performance from Larson herself. Flunking out of art school and still living at home, Kit’s (Larson) life has stalled. The most consistent criticism levelled at the so-called ‘millennial’ generation is…
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Film Review: Racer and the Jailbird
★★☆☆☆ Racer Bibi (Adèle Exarchopoulos) gets her adrenaline kicks on the track, but Jailbird Gigi (Matthias Schoenaerts) takes his rush from pulling bank jobs with his friends. When the two fall in love, Gigi must decide whether to confess what he does, or give it up altogether. Where most crime thrillers often relegate the romance…
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Film Review: Chappaquiddick
★★★☆☆ By 1969, Ted Kennedy (played here by Jason Clarke) was the only a surviving brother of the famed political dynasty. But on 18th July of that year, a terrible accident on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts put paid to Kennedy’s presidential aspirations. John Curran’s dramatisation of the incident opens with Mary Jo Kopechne (Kate Mara), one…
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Toronto 2017: I Love You, Daddy review
★★★★☆ Louis C.K. returns to the director’s chair for the first time since 2001’s Pootie Tang. Though not quite up there with his best TV work, I Love You, Daddy is a hilarious, awkward and boundary-pushing comedy about fatherhood, anxiety and the ethics of relationships.Fans of C.K.’s comedy drama series Louie should know largely what…
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Toronto 2017: Gutland review
★★★☆☆ His first film since 2011’s We Might as Well Fail, Govinda Van Maele’s Gutland is an atmospheric, gripping mystery set in the Luxembourg countryside. Arriving in a small village, German Jens (Frederick Lau) is looking for work as a farmhand – and to hide.Though he’s readily accepted by the locals – especially by flirtatious…
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Film Review: Caniba
★★★★★ In 1981, while in Paris, Issei Sagawa murdered and cannibalised Dutch student Reneé Hartevelt. Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor’s documentary about Sagawa, Caniba, is an intimate, disturbing and unique portrait of a man consumed by profoundly dark urges. Is it possible to understand the urges of a cannibal, or are some taboos too far…
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DVD Review: Song to Song
★★☆☆☆ People in glass houses shouldn’t be in Terrence Malick films, but invariably they are and the temptation to throw bricks is becoming almost overpowering. Song to Song is the latest of a triptych of contemporary relationship melodramas from the once-reclusive auteur.As ever, famous beautiful people wander while Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera butterflies around them before…
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