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Lynn Shelton knows how to tell a good story. I loved Hump Day (2009) and Your Sister’s Sister (2011) and, like them, Sword of Trust is full of wry humour, great characters and cracking dialogue. Continue reading
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I can’t get this film by Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) out of my head. I went to it with some trepidation after tales of mass walkouts at the Sydney Film Festival. Continue reading
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I booked this one without knowing much about the film, enticed primarily by the live soundtrack by Sampa the Great and the story about being a young, poor, black French woman, with all its beauty and tragedy. Continue reading
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This was not at all what I expected. My tendency is to skim over a synopsis if there are some key trigger words – in this case Tilda Swinton and Richard Ayoade. I think I was expecting something akin to the polished drawing-room drama of Sally Potter’s The Party (2017). It couldn’t have been more different. Continue reading
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I loved Maya Newell’s Gayby Baby (2015). She has a knack of removing herself from the frame and immersing us in the intimate world of family. It can seem like a commonplace tale until you slowly realise that she is personalising key social concerns, allowing us a window into the impact of prejudice, racism and institutionalised apathy. Continue reading
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I was thoroughly charmed by this quirky Macedonian tale of courage and self determination by Teona Strugar Mitevska. Continue reading
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Lyn Ramsey’s (We Need to Talk About Kevin, Morvern Callar) latest grips you in its sweaty fist and doesn’t let up until the final frame. It’s enigmatic, intense and artful, filling each frame with the lumbering presence of Joaquin Phoenix. Continue reading
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This memorable feature from Nadine Labaki seems to provoke love or hate. Cast with predominantly non-actors, it is for the most part an extraordinary film that shows the awful reality of the life of Syrian children well below the poverty line in Lebanon. Continue reading
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Unrolling like a gentle dream, Beatriz Seigner’s Los Silencios takes the serious subject of the displacement of Colombian refugees and tells it in a lyrical and ethereal way. Continue reading
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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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