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3.5/5
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Housekeeping for Beginners
(2023)
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Anwen Crawford
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The film’s ensemble cast is uniformly strong, including tiny Dzada Selim as kindergartener Mia, raucous yet wise beyond her years.
Posted May 09, 2024
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2.5/5
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Force of Nature: The Dry 2
(2024)
|
Debbie Zhou
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Ultimately, the film can’t shake off the weight of its unsmiling, earnest police protagonist.
Posted Feb 08, 2024
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2.5/5
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Napoleon
(2023)
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Philippa Hawker
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The Napoleon-Josephine relationship sits awkwardly alongside moments of spectacle, physicality, and dramatic scale.
Posted Dec 01, 2023
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4/5
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Killers of the Flower Moon
(2023)
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Philippa Hawker
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It is a story of murder, manipulation, and survival, an engrossing, deliberate work that also has expansive, unexpected moments and disconcerting juxtapositions. It is packed with vivid cameos and has three striking performances at its centre.
Posted Nov 04, 2023
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2.5/5
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A Haunting in Venice
(2023)
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Philippa Hawker
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In dispensing with Christie’s plot, Green and Branagh haven’t really brought anything strong or surprising to the narrative. It’s all ambiance and angle. If they are planning another Poirot, they need to rethink their approach.
Posted Sep 14, 2023
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4/5
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One Fine Morning
(2022)
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Philippa Hawker
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In French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve’s One Fine Morning (Un beau matin), books play a significant role: as physical objects, gifts, talismans, sources of connection, works in progress. Above all, books can represent a life.
Posted Jul 20, 2023
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3/5
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Dalíland
(2022)
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Philippa Hawker
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The central performances are strong.
Posted Jul 20, 2023
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4.5/5
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Martin Eden
(2019)
|
Keva York
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[A] ravishing adaptation of Jack London's 1909 Künstlerroman.
Posted Nov 04, 2021
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2.5/5
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Judy & Punch
(2019)
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Anwen Crawford
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The sense that we're watching events occur outside a real time or place distances us from them. The film's main achievement is in visual design.
Posted Nov 20, 2019
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3/5
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Little Woods
(2018)
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Anwen Crawford
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Like so many American stories, Little Woods is a drama about personal agency, but it's also a dramatisation of what it means, in material terms, to have very little agency to exercise.
Posted May 17, 2019
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2.5/5
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Loro
(2018)
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Anwen Crawford
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...why render it all over again, especially when the whole scenario is left to fizzle out, and is never revived?
Posted Jan 11, 2019
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3.5/5
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Lean on Pete
(2017)
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Anwen Crawford
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Plummer plays the part with an emotional discipline that belies his youth.
Posted Dec 01, 2018
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3.5/5
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Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot
(2018)
|
Barnaby Smith
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Though dubious aspects cannot be ignored, this is ultimately an extremely affecting study of atonement and fulfillment.
Posted Oct 26, 2018
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3/5
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You Were Never Really Here
(2017)
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Anwen Crawford
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You Were Never Really Here feels much more remote and unreal in its scenario, and though it has been compared several times already to Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976), I'm not sure that the comparison holds weight.
Posted Sep 06, 2018
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5/5
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BlacKkKlansman
(2018)
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Anwen Crawford
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Some viewers may feel that Lee is being didactic, or literal, but I think that BlacKkKlansman is a vital film arriving at a critical moment.
Posted Aug 15, 2018
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3/5
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Looking for Grace
(2015)
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Eloise Ross
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Looking For Grace has a touching dnouement, moving but unsentimental - one of Brooks's specialties - but it comes too late after the uneven dialogue and the flat humour.
Posted Jul 10, 2018
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5/5
|
Moonlight
(2016)
|
Whitney Monaghan
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Moonlight - ground-breaking cinema - is both expansive and deeply personal; a must-see for all lovers of the silver screen.
Posted Jul 09, 2018
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3/5
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Joe Cinque's Consolation
(2016)
|
Jake Wilson
|
This imperfect but unusual film suggests understanding might finally be out of reach - to the point where it is hard to draw any certain moral.
Posted Jul 09, 2018
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4/5
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Measure of a Man
(2018)
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Philippa Hawker
|
The accumulating power of The Measure of a Man is in its small details and undemonstrative approach.
Posted Jul 09, 2018
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4/5
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Women He's Undressed
(2015)
|
Eloise Ross
|
Women He's Undressed is a wonderful documentary, with Armstrong revealing some real gems about a man we should all be proud to call Australian.
Posted Jul 09, 2018
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2.5/5
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The Bookshop
(2017)
|
Jake Wilson
|
There is something dismaying about a film that purports to champion books yet verges on being a sentimental betrayal of its own source.
Posted Jul 09, 2018
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3.5/5
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The Lost City of Z
(2016)
|
Jake Wilson
|
There is a tricky balance here, which Gray does not quite successfully maintain.
Posted Jul 09, 2018
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|
3.5/5
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The One I Love
(2014)
|
Eloise Ross
|
This is the film's final strength and a knowing twist on the title, adverting to the film's core concern: how well can you really know the one you love?
Posted Jul 09, 2018
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|
2.5/5
|
Mary Shelley
(2018)
|
Barnaby Smith
|
[An] occasionally charming, mostly guileless, and ultimately patchy film...
Posted Jul 09, 2018
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|
2/5
|
The Second
(2018)
|
Lauren Carroll Harris
|
...the plotline unfolds with such a lack of clarity that it is hard to know what The Second saying about the sexual power, or disempowerment, of teen girls.
Posted Jul 05, 2018
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3/5
|
Brothers' Nest
(2018)
|
Lauren Carroll Harris
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It's quite touching, in a demented way, despite the feeling that the script could have dug deeper and more drolly into the moral ambiguity of toxic bonds, family trauma, and parental failure.
Posted Jun 20, 2018
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3/5
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Disobedience
(2017)
|
Anwen Crawford
|
Lelio's real strength is as a director of actors... Both Weisz and McAdams are committed and convincing.
Posted Jun 13, 2018
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5/5
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BPM (Beats Per Minute)
(2017)
|
Anwen Crawford
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As the film moves fluidly between protests, meetings, club nights, and affairs...we are left with the impression of a time and a place in which nothing, not even death, seems inevitable.
Posted May 17, 2018
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4/5
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Loveless
(2017)
|
Anwen Crawford
|
Something vital, his films intimates, has been lost in Russia, and perhaps not only in Russia - some warmth of the soul, a sense of civic accountability. As with the child, no one even noticed it slipping away.
Posted Apr 25, 2018
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3.5/5
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The Death of Stalin
(2017)
|
Anwen Crawford
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The Death of Stalin is obviously a farce, in the best sense; the primary aim is never verisimilitude. The film shares something of the attitude and atmosphere that pervades a work like Dario Fo's.
Posted Mar 27, 2018
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4.5/5
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Lady Bird
(2017)
|
Anwen Crawford
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First time writer-director Greta Gerwig, an experienced actor, is attuned to the mix of munificence and selfishness that makes up the adolescent heart.
Posted Feb 15, 2018
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|
0.5/5
|
Wonder Wheel
(2017)
|
Lauren Carroll Harris
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Autobiographical readings can be a lazy, obvious way to interpret the work of an artist, but with its triangular love affairs with stepdaughters and lost women in distress, it is impossible to read Wonder Wheel as anything but.
Posted Dec 07, 2017
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3/5
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The Killing of a Sacred Deer
(2017)
|
Anwen Crawford
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The emotional stakes are lowered in Lanthimos's world, but the operation of power is much the same as it ever was.
Posted Nov 16, 2017
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1.5/5
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Three Summers
(2017)
|
Lauren Carroll Harris
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A feel-good film about racism? Okay.
Posted Nov 02, 2017
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|
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Saving Mr. Banks
(2013)
|
Tara Judah
|
Much like the morals in his movies, apparently Walt Disney can melt the heart of even the hardest villain. So says the global brand of myth and fairy tale, our greatest source of hearsay and speculation.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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|
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Tracks
(2013)
|
Tara Judah
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As a version of her adventures, Tracks navigates its way to the big screen safely enough; its bearings are only slightly off compass.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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|
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Here I Am
(2010)
|
Jake Wilson
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If a picture is usually worth a thousand words, there is a shelf-full of history here.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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|
|
Carnage
(2011)
|
Jake Wilson
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Without being obtrusive about it, [Roman] Polanski uses every cinematic trick at his command to increase tension: viewed through distorting wide-angle lenses, the characters appear to gain and lose stature from shot to shot.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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|
|
The Turning
(2013)
|
Jake Wilson
|
The Turning resembles an epic round of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse, in which players separately draw parts of a human figure on a sheet of paper which is then unfolded to reveal the bizarre whole.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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|
|
Fallout
(2013)
|
Jake Wilson
|
Fallout offers a valuable new account of both book and film, placing both in the context of a historical moment when nuclear annihilation seemed a more than plausible threat.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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|
|
The Invisible Woman
(2013)
|
Jake Wilson
|
The strength of the film lies in the sense that [Ralph] Fiennes has set out to capitalise on these absences, using Tucker's prosaic, BBC-style screenplay as the basis for something more experimental and oblique.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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|
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Half of a Yellow Sun
(2013)
|
Jake Wilson
|
[Biyi] Bandele seizes every opportunity to build atmosphere with heightened colours and streaked lighting patterns. It helps that the cinematographer John de Borman, shoots on 35-millimetre film rather than digitally, nowadays an increasingly rare choice.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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|
3/5
|
Consolation
(2010)
|
Jake Wilson
|
This imperfect but unusual film suggests understanding might finally be out of reach - to the point where it is hard to draw any certain moral.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
|
|
|
Trishna
(2011)
|
Philippa Hawker
|
Alec d'Urberville, the wayward idler who seduces Tess, and Angel Clare, the compulsively virtuous youngman she loves, 'the earnestest man in Wessex', have been distilled [in this adaptation] into a single, somewhat problematic figure.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
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4/55
|
The Measure of a Man
(2015)
|
Philippa Hawker
|
The accumulating power of The Measure of a Man is in its small details and undemonstrative approach.
Posted Oct 14, 2017
|
|
2/5
|
High-Rise
(2015)
|
Anwen Crawford
|
High-Rise has no shortage of vivid images to tempt the eager filmmaker, from a ransacked supermarket to an Afghan hound floating dead in a swimming pool. What's harder to convey is that distinctive Ballardian tone.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
|
|
4.5/5
|
Manchester by the Sea
(2016)
|
Anwen Crawford
|
[Michelle] Williams has only a few scenes but makes her mark in all of them.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
|
|
4/5
|
Love & Friendship
(2016)
|
Anwen Crawford
|
Love and Friendship is very funny, funnier still for its absence of moral reckoning.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
|
|
3.5/5
|
A United Kingdom
(2016)
|
Anwen Crawford
|
Though A United Kingdom has an emotional arc that is too predictable, its resurrection of a widely forgotten piece of twentieth-century history is worthy.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
|
|
1.5/5
|
Berlin Syndrome
(2017)
|
Anwen Crawford
|
The navet of the main character feels far less credible.
Posted Sep 12, 2017
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