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Cannes 2019: Sibyl review
★★★☆☆ Movies love certain professions and psychotherapy is certainly one. They have to listen to people’s problems while (usually) masking their own issues. From Richard Burton in Equus to Billy Crystal in Analyse This, there’s an undoubted attraction to a job which involves lots of listening to other people’s stories.
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Cannes 2019: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite wins Palme d’Or
It’s been a vintage edition of the Cannes Film Festival, with many excellent contenders in the competition. The Palme d’Or went to South Korean director Bong Joon-ho and his masterful black comedy thriller Parasite. It was a popular choice that bested the likes of Ken Loach, Justine Triet and Pedro Almodóvar.
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Film Review: Zombi Child
★★★☆☆ Bertrand Bonello’s arthouse horror oddity Zombi Child works best as a film about colonial trauma and the tragic history of Haiti. Those expecting a traditional zombie flick with flesh-eating ghouls clawing at the doors will soon learn this one is more Jacques Tourneur in style than a George A. Romero feast of gore. It’s…
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Cannes 2019: Oh Mercy! review
★★☆☆☆ It’s time the Cannes Film Festival called a moratorium on screening the works of French director Arnaud Desplechin until he can come back with work as good as A Christmas Tale. Co-written with Léa Mysius, Oh Mercy! has no business competing for the Palme d’Or.
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Film Review: Parasite
★★★★★ Families on the lower end of the pay scale have proven fertile ground for filmmakers of late, from Hirokazy Kore-eda’s Palme d’Or-winning Shoplifters to Ken Loach’s latest Sorry We Missed You. But you’d be hard-put to find anything with the acerbic brilliance of Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, a masterful dissection of social inequality and the…
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Film Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
★★★★★ Before the first screening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, an official from the Cannes Film Festival mounted the stage and read a statement from director Quentin Tarantino and the producers asking that critics try to avoid spoilers in our reviews and so allow audiences to enjoy the film in its pure form.…
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Cannes 2019: Portrait of a Lady on Fire review
★★★★☆ A highly flammable love affair smoulders in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a painter with a spark in her eye. Although she is always aware of convention and tradition, she also knows how to bend the rules to further her own pursuit of art. She smokes a…
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Film Review: Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound
★★★☆☆ Making Waves: The Art of Cinematic Sound serves as a history lesson and welcome tribute to a crucial element of moviemaking routinely ignored. Critics love to zero in on the relationship between directors and their stars, or directors and cinematographers, but rarely (if ever) the sound editor or ADR supervisor. How often do we…
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Film Review: The Lighthouse
★★★★★ There’s something heartening about genius being put in the service of madness. Already this Cannes we’ve seen the exemplar in a fully restored 4K version of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but at the Quinzaine a sea-change took place. Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is something rich and strange, but also something of the body and…
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Film Review: John Wick: Chapter 3
★★★★★ Time is running out for the Master of Death himself, John Wick (Keanu Reeves). After killing his nemesis on the consecrated ground of the Continental Hotel, he’s on the run and ex-communicado. The first film was about revenge, the second about repercussions. Now, as Wick is funnelled through a series of exotic locales and…
VENICE 2026
