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Film Review: Nowhere Special
★★★★☆ “This is the most important decision of my life”, single father John (James Norton) pleads to his social worker. “How will I know if I’ve got it right?” The decision in question, and the premise of Italian director Uberto Pasolini’s latest film Nowhere Special, is who will adopt John’s son, Michael (Daniel Lamont) after…
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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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Cannes 2021: Our picks of the festival
There’s never been a Cannes quite like this. Vaccine passports, saliva tests, face-masks: welcome to the Croisette in the time of Covid. Cannes has returned, following a year long deferral. Spike Lee is again head of the jury and some of the films are the same as Cannes 2020, but overall there is a startling…
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How to turn your love of photography into a filmmaking career
For camera lovers in 2021, there are tremendous opportunities to share your photographs and even make money from them. You can start a freelancing career with a free photography portfolio that looks incredibly professional. Then, with a personalised email address and some guts, you can start contacting companies who might be interested in hiring you.…
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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…
VENICE 2026
