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New Release Reviews

New Release: Beau Is Afraid (Ari Aster, 2023)

In the closing moments of Ari Aster’s latest ‘elevated horror film’, our beleaguered hero Beau Wasserman (Joaquin Phoenix) is sat in a small motorboat – forcefully moored in a giant pool within a darkened stadium full of all the people he has ever known – having to defend his life against none other than his […]

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New Release Reviews

New Release: Pamfir

Leonid was once a legendary smuggler. He could run for miles – supplies strapped to his back – to deliver goods from his Ukrainian town to nearby Romania. But those days are over. He’s just returned home from a work stint in Poland and is now digging a well for the local church. He wants […]

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New Release Reviews

New Release: The Menu

Director Mark Mylod is best known for drama series such as Succession and Game of Thrones, but he breaks out of TV dramas with the horror comedy The Menu (2022). This Golden Globe nominee follows a group of esteemed guests and their haunting experience at one of the world’s most exclusive restaurants. Last minute edition […]

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Feature Reviews

Best Films of 2022

Aftersun (Dir. Charlotte Wells)A poignant meditation on memory and childhood, Charlotte Wells’s film is a small marvel that has rightly garnered critical acclaim across the board. 11 year-old Sophie is on a Turkish holiday with her loving but troubled father, she experiencing the onset of awkward adolescence while he struggles with the disappointments and anxieties […]

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New Release Reviews

New Release: Bones and All

BONES: Any of the pieces of hard whitish tissue making up the skeleton in humans and other vertebrates. AND: Conjunction, used to connect words of the same part of speech, clauses, or sentences, that are to be taken jointly. ALL: Everything – everything under the sun, and, indeed, above and/or beyond the sun, including your […]

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Reviews Widescreen

No Utopia: On Wyatt Rockefeller’s Settlers (2021)

According to SpaceX CEO, Elon Musk, the company’s proposal to colonize the planet Mars is “about believing in the future and thinking that the future will be better than the past.”  The vision is of a self-sustaining Mars-based city home to one million inhabitants. The relative ease and cheapness of the SpaceX Starship and Falcon […]

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New Release Reviews

New Release: The Banshees of Inisherin

I believe in reading as a creative experience. The Reader comes to the work with their intellect, imagination, expectations, wants and needs, and sets out, consciously or not, to forge their very own “version” of the original text, however sacred. And that “version” will be different from yours, mine or anyone else’s. As with The […]

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Brilliant Failure Reviews

Brilliant Failure: Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980)

A scene in Michael Cimino’s epic Western, Heaven’s Gate (1980), always reminds me of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 ­– the fall of the Twin Towers, man’s almost primitive need for contact in a time of extremis (extremis most of us could never imagine), his endless fight for survival. Much has already been said and […]

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New Release Reviews

New Release: Prey

Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey (2022) simultaneously pays respect to and gently subverts the 1987 Arnie vehicle to which it is a loose prequel. On the one hand, it grounds the franchise in the simple premise that made John McTiernan’s Predator so effective to begin with: two creatures – one human, one extraterrestrial – going head-to-head in […]