mon 17/02/2025

Film

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy review - older, sadder Bridget has started ditching the ditz

Bridget Jones has grown up: v.v.g. Our heroine is still prone to daft pratfalls and gaffes and bursts of sensational idiot dancing. But passing time has lent her an enhanced self-awareness that has nothing to do with calories consumed. This...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof on 'The Seed of the Sacred Fig' - 'It became a question of self-respect'

Iranian director Mohammad Rasoulof is now an Oscar-nominated refugee, in a bittersweet harvest for his film The Seed of the Sacred Fig.The 52-year-old has previously probed the moral cost of his country’s dictatorship in Manuscripts Don’t Burn (2013...

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Captain America: Brave New World review - talking loud, saying nothing

In his first weeks in office, Harrison Ford’s US president survives an assassination attempt inside the White House, goes to war with Japan and mutates into Red Hulk when he gets mad, trashing said White House with a Stars and Stripes flag-holder....

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Memoir of a Snail review - deliciously offbeat Australian animation

Having recently watched the charming animation Marcelle The Shell With Shoes On with my nine-year-old son, I was going to suggest for our next movie night we check out Memoir of a Snail. Jolly fortunate that I didn’t, as this is a very different...

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To a Land Unknown review - the migrant hustle

The Refugee Movie is rapidly becoming a genre unto itself, with elements of suspense and humanism woven together into something that’s very properly cinematic.Films like Io Capitano and Green Border, tracking the tragic migrant trail to and through...

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Blu-ray: High and Low

Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of different genres is a given and one of High and Low’s strengths is a seamless blending of various styles within a single film. Though highly rated by Japanese critics, this 1963 adaptation of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct...

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Bring Them Down review - ramming it home in the west of Ireland

“You know what they say: where there’s livestock, there’s dead stock,” says Jack (a brilliant Barry Keoghan). Never a truer word. There’s an awful lot of dead and maimed stock – sheep, to be precise – in Christopher Andrews’ gory, gloom-ridden...

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September 5 review - gripping real-life thriller

There’s a common understanding about journalists, especially ones at the top of their game, that they’re flying by the seat of their pants – propelled by adrenalin, deadlines, ambition and, just occasionally, righteousness.September 5 ...

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Blu-ray: Stray Dog

Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing mistakes and madness. The theft of callow detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune)’s police pistol on a...

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Hard Truths review - a bravura, hyperreal performance from Marianne Jean-Baptiste

A colleague once told me that I shouldn’t take Mike Leigh’s films with contemporary settings as slices of everyday life. He was right: they’re hyperreal. Especially Hard Truths, in which his take on a woman both depressed and angry – it’s possible...

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Saturday Night review - a dizzying 90-minute trip to a landmark TV event

“A countercultural sketch show full of unknowns, with no script, no structure.” The verdict of NBC’s head of talent about the embryonic Saturday Night Live expresses everything audiences loved about it when it first aired in 1975.To capture the...

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By the Stream review - enigmatic Korean drama

“I lead a peaceful, idle life, running a bookstore in Gangneung. Honestly, no customers.” Chu Si-eon (Kwon Hae-hyo) is genial and self-deprecating but he was previously a well-known actor and director before he criticised the authorities and was...

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