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IFFR 2021: Gritt review
★★★★☆ Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s Gritt is a funny, maddening and at times touching work about art, ambition and how to live. The titular Gritt (Birgitte Larsen) is a familiar figure, both in real life and in culture: the artistic meanderer who desperately wants to express herself but is somehow unable to work out quite what…
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IFFR 2021: Black Medusa review
★★★☆☆ Nada (played with resolute sternness by Nour Hajri) is a young woman who leads a double life. By day she works for an online company; at night she scours the bars and clubs of Tunis for men who want to take her home. There are plenty. Once she has someone hooked, she drugs them…
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Film Review: Simple Passion
★★★★☆ Since September, Hélène (Laetitia Dosch) tells us, she has thought about nothing but a man she can’t have. “I kept working, I went to movies, I did the shopping, I read. But everything I did seemed to be cut off from reality”. In sensual romantic drama Simple Passion, Lebanese-born director Danielle Arbid captures viscerally…
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Film Review: A Glitch in the Matrix
★☆☆☆☆ Twenty-two years after the release of The Matrix, documentarian Rodney Ascher examines the question of whether we can ever really know what’s real in this incurious and intellectually questionable documentary. Ascher’s previous films – The Shining-inspired Room 237 and his somnambulant Nightmare among them – have always had an element of the paranoid and…
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Sundance 2021: In the Same Breath review
★★★★★ In the Same Breath, Nanfu Wang’s searing expose of the origins of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and its pursuant handling by the Chinese and U.S. governments, is a film of contradictions, conflict and cover-ups. A galling, distressing but enthralling documentary, it opens and closes with New Year’s Eve celebrations in Wuhan, the epicentre of…
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Sundance 2021: Captains of Zaatari review
★★★★☆ Tell any football fan that ‘It’s just a game’ and they are likely to give you very short shrift. But for close friends Mahmoud Dagher and Fawzi Qatleesh the stakes are considerably higher. For in Ali El Arabi’s stirring documentary Captains of Zaatari their love for the beautiful game offers purpose, opportunity and a…
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Sundance 2021: At the Ready review
★★★★☆ Building bridges between the past, present and future of three Latinx teens in El Paso, Texas, Maisie Crow’s At the Ready investigates one of the US’s most contentious domestic issues – immigration across its southern border – from an unorthodox angle. Cristina, César and Mason (who came out as transgender after filming and is…
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Sundance 2021: Prime Time review
★★☆☆☆ Jakub Piątek’s Prime Time is a claustrophobic chamber piece set in Warsaw on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Bringing his narrative feature debut to Sundance in the World Cinema Dramatic Competition, the Polish writer-director harks back twenty years to an age of VHS tapes, analogue television and robotic Nokia ringtones. Co-written with Łukasz Czapski, the script pits lone gunman…
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Sundance 2021: President review
★★★★☆ “This is a war room. I am here for a fight.” Under no illusion as to the scale of the task at hand, the deck is stacked against leader of the Movement for Democratic Change party and presidential candidate, Nelson Chamisa. A follow-up to her 2014 film Democrats, Camilla Nielsson’s President tracks the rocky…
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Sundance 2021: Playing with Sharks review
★★★☆☆ A daredevil activity that for most would be considered the stuff of nightmares has, for diver and marine conservationist Valerie Taylor, been a lifelong passion. Dispelling myths and challenging preconceptions that humankind has of the ocean’s ancient selachian inhabitants, Sally Aitken’s Playing with Sharks is a loving biography of an indomitable, fearless pioneer and…
VENICE 2026