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This serviceable dramatisation of the life of author Mary Shelley (Elle Fanning) satisfies as much as it disappoints. Feeling a bit like a made-for-TV movie, director Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda) paints by numbers, giving us a long succession of plot points with a good dose of high emotion but little drama. Continue reading
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This unusual and well-meaning Australian film by Ben Gilmour follows an ex-soldier as he attempts to contact the widow and children of a civilian he killed in Kandahar, Afghanistan, whilst on deployment. Continue reading
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This short South Korean virtual reality film mixes static and moving imagery to evoke words sent from a man to a woman as he revisit the places they went to together. Like a poem, we sense the emptiness of the spaces without her, the monochrome of lost punctuated by the saturated colour of memory. Continue reading
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Virtual Reality at its best immerses you in a human experience in a way that cinema can’t. Parragirls Past, Present floats you slowly through a mostly ghost-like recreation of the Parramatta Girls’ Home while former inmates – survivors – recount their stories. Continue reading
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Usually, you going to a heist movie expecting tension, action and a black-and-white resolution – capture or escape. Don’t expect this from Alonso Ruizpalacios’s Museum, loosely based on the real life theft of Mayan antiquities from the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City in the 1980s. Continue reading
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Sari Braithwaite’s hour long introspective documentary built from clips cut out of films by the Australian Censor Board goes some way to exploring the notion of censorship. Continue reading
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Not as blackly comedic as I was expecting, more bleakly tragic, Malgorzata Szumowska’s Mug doesn’t hide its overt criticism of the hypocrisy of religious complacency, as shown by the narrowmindedness of the people of a rural Polish town. Continue reading
