Tag: Movie
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Heal The Living: Universal health

In a series of stark scenes Katell Quillévéré destroys one life and saves another. When a teenager sustains unrecoverable brain damage in an early morning car accident, the organs within his stable body take on an urgency of their own. The medical professionals know the brain is dead long before they receive the scans detailing…
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The Weekly Roundup: 07/05/17

Sundays are for whiling away the hours in your nearest public park. Well, that and extracting all possible content from the internet, like a techbro’s $600 juicer from proprietary juice bags. James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is as good as the original, it just took a shape that I liked a hell of…
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The Transfiguration: Modern vampires of the city

Maybe it just came out at the wrong time in the UK. Watching The Transfiguration a couple of weeks after watching Raw was never gonna do it many favours. Two films playing around with horror movie tropes, the cannibal, the vampire, as a way to explore contemporary politics. This one is looking at the abandonment…
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The Promise: Declawed horror

If there was any promise evident in Terry George and Robin Swicord’s often clunking screenplay before production started, it is not apparent in the final film. It has been stolen away, in these flat, overlit scenes edited with a clear mandate to keep the running time low and accompanied by this overwrought score.
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A Dog’s Purpose: It’s a pup

‘I feel mislead by the advertising of A Dog’s Purpose’, is a stupid statement by a stupid person. It’s also my feeling. Like, it’s supposed to be about this dog being reincarnated in order to figure out what their life’s purpose is. There’s a whole bunch of posters with extreme close ups of loads of…
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Clash: Political hotbox

I’m trying to calculate how much my wish for Clash to deal more directly with its politics is an extension of my own privilege. I mean, complaining that a film ain’t catering to my tastes as I sit in a nice seat in a art cinema with an almost entirely white clientele, seems almost hypocritical.…
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Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Pure indulgence

When I got to thinking about the original Guardians of the Galaxy and this new one, I keep coming around to the title sequences. The first one starts, as films irritatingly thought they could do for a while before, the production cards with that prologue about the death of Star Lord’s mother. Then it has…
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The Happiest Day in the Life of Olli Mäki: Just lovely

See, just when I was getting disillusioned a good film about straight people comes along. Maybe there is some worth in them. A Finnish film about a 1960s boxer’s training in the lead up to a world championship bout stealths its way into being the best love movie in a while. Mainly because what the…
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Letters From Baghdad: Lady Lawrence

There’s this amazing bit in the story of Gertrude Bell when, on one of her Middle Eastern expeditions she runs into a young man working as an apprentice at an archaeological site. And she tells him, ‘Hey dude, I know you’re just starting out, but you’re digging all shitty. We’re trying to preserve history here,…
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The Sense of an Ending: This fucking guy

I’m sure The Sense of an Ending is a very accomplished film. It looks pretty and has a bunch of good performances. Jim Broadbent, looking more Jeremy Corbyn than ever, is more than believable in his role, a creaking aging man wiling away his retirement in a specialist camera shop which keeps its Yale lock…