Category: Review
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Their Finest: Its own propaganda
Chris Nolan’s Dunkirk is coming out later this year. I hope it’s good. The film websites are already full of the news, Director of Photography Hoyte Van Hoytema, manhandling the IMAX camera to capture war’s viscera. The trailer for it actually was played before my screening. Maybe we’ll someday get a film about its production…
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Lady Macbeth: No, not that one
I caught a preview of Lady Macbeth at the Watershed, Bristol, accompanied by a Q&A by director William Oldroyd. The film releases to UK cinemas on April 28. She’s not that Lady Macbeth. Not the famous one. Not the, ‘Out, damned spot!’ and the ‘Come, you spirits/ that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,/…
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The Handmaiden: Lesbian movie night
The Handmaiden is like the purest film. It’s a violent, kinda screwed up, crime thriller but, underneath all that surface there it has this wonderful innocent heart. Maybe I’m saying that because it’s a costume drama about queer women, which I am all about, but equally they are women whose queerness does not express itself…
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Fast & Furious 8: I don’t care what you Americans call it.
It’s called Fast & Furious 8 here in the UK. Seems to be Fate of the Furious in other markets. Misleading; there don’t seem much fateful or furious about this joint. We open in Cuba, I guess the lifting of the embargo has made it the new hot place for films to visit. It is…
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Some Cold Takes: The Lost City of Z and Ghost in the Shell
The Lost City of Z Patriarchy’s one hell of a drug innit? Percy Fawcett can just go off to Bolivia, searching for his lost city, neglecting his wife and children who carry on in England without him. Whiteness is toxic. He tries to disrupt paternalistic eurocentrism by searching for civilisation in Southern America, yet neglects…
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Raw: I just realised, it’s probably about vegetarianism too…
Holy shit. Holy shit y’all. Holy shit. Raw is Julia Ducournau’s first feature. It’s the sort of first feature people dream of making. The sort of debut that means something. It’s a French language film the screened in the UK with the standard Universal Pictures ident at the lead, that don’t just happen here. Not…
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I Am Not Your Negro: A tonic for the blind
Most of the time I’ve spent ‘writing’ this review has actually been spent researching James Baldwin. Reading extracts from his essays, novels, plays; watching him appear on the talk shows that the film extracts from; that famous 1965 Cambridge debate with William F. Buckley Jr. to whom the film rightly does not give a voice.…
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Some Cold Takes: Life and Chips
Life Life is a film by perverts. Serious. The ISS horror flick is, when it’s not trying to be Gravity, the most legit affecting horror movie I seen recently. Mostly cos the setting turns the cabin the woods into something weird and new. Not without its problems, given everything gotta be so technical, we treated…
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Smurfs: The Lost Village – Some sexist narratives ain’t worth reclaiming
I learned after watching that Smurfs: The Lost Village is unrelated to those other recent Smurfs movies. I just figured it was a sequel. It feels so much like a sequel. Maybe you really need to be aware of The Smurfs as a cultural product to get the full buy in here, the film don’t…
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Going in Style: Capital idea
Going in Style is a Zach Braff joint which can mean only one thing, its stifling mediocrity. Possibly it’s just poorly timed, I mean Hell or High Water just got that best picture nom so the story of an amateur bank heist designed to retrieve funds immorally taken is already fresh in our minds. Where…
A Grand Quiet 