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Red Rock West
(1993)
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Nigel Andrews
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What a pleasure to see a kiss-bang thriller in which both forms of consummation are dealt out slowly, teasingly, appetisingly, rather than force-fed to us from frame one.
Posted Jul 16, 2025
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4/5
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My Mom Jayne
(2025)
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Dan Einav
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What emerges, through raw reflections, frank conversations and illustrative archive clips of Mansfield herself is a revealing portrait of a woman who was beautiful, sharp-witted and warm but also enigmatic and inaccessible.
Posted Jul 14, 2025
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3/5
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Modi: Three Days on the Wing of Madness
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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We are meant to cheer in admiration, though the high jinks get so repetitive, even an anarchist might call for a gendarme. Still, the movie has a thesis, or at least an opinion.
Posted Jul 14, 2025
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5/5
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Pavements
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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And yet the film is droll but never snotty, richly inventive, and so smartly executed that reality blurs.
Posted Jul 14, 2025
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4/5
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Apocalypse in the Tropics
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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The film takes on the tone of investigative journalism, though Malafaia scarcely needs exposing. The harder task would seem to be keeping him off camera, and from boasting of his clout with Bolsonaro.
Posted Jul 14, 2025
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3/5
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The Shrouds
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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The thriller-ish notes have a vagueness you might find playful or exasperating. Dialogue can be mannered. Still. We shouldn’t be blasé about a filmmaker this fascinated with ideas — the real stuff of life.
Posted Jul 14, 2025
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4/5
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Hot Milk
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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Built around two daredevil performances from Fiona Shaw and Emma Mackey, it is jagged and dreamlike at once, the story of a mother and daughter locked in codependence.
Posted Jul 14, 2025
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3/5
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Heads of State
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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Like a gym-toned Laurel and Hardy, the mess they get themselves into is — broadly speaking — fine.
Posted Jul 14, 2025
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Explorers
(1985)
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Nigel Andrews
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It proves not so much a simple failure, more two different but intriguing movies painfully yoked together.
Posted Jul 10, 2025
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3/5
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Superman
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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The story too can feel scanty and overstuffed... Looking on the bright side, as he would surely like us to, it is also true that very little drags, that Corenswet, Brosnahan and Hoult do well; and that moments here and there are authentically funny.
Posted Jul 08, 2025
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3/5
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Chicken Town
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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Chicken Town can feel a little scuffed too, with a few creaks to the dialogue, but it is likeable and lovingly made, down to the detail of Bernard Hughes’ sprightly score, and the careful look of the suburban landscape.
Posted Jul 01, 2025
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4/5
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Sudan, Remember Us
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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What the film doesn’t offer is a ready timeline of modern Sudan to map the wider, tragic context. The flipside is bearing witness to hope in close-up.
Posted Jul 01, 2025
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2/5
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Jurassic World Rebirth
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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How can a movie about mutant dinosaurs be this forgettable to look at? It’s a shame. Great schlock is one of life’s real pleasures, but Koepp is too bored for that, and Edwards too earnest.
Posted Jun 30, 2025
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Supergirl
(1984)
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Malcolm Rutherford
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As usual, the real stars of the Superseries are the special effects and the climax is noisily spectacular.
Posted Jun 28, 2025
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4/5
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M3GAN 2.0
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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Now have M3gan 2.0, among the more inevitable sequels in film history. Less predictable is that it is actually very good fun.
Posted Jun 25, 2025
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4/5
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Grenfell: Uncovered
(2025)
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Rebecca Nicholson
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The film is upsetting and harrowing throughout, but it is driven by a clear sense of a need for justice, and an acknowledgment of the lack of justice to date.
Posted Jun 24, 2025
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4/5
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F1 The Movie
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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Kosinski has found some rhymes between blockbuster movie making and Formula 1: another epic spectacle reliant on teamwork, rare talents and a vast stack of cash.
Posted Jun 24, 2025
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5/5
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Holloway
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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The focus is the recent past and the here and now. The effect is hugely powerful. The film is hard to shake.
Posted Jun 24, 2025
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3/5
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The Last Journey
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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The movie is a crowd-pleasing record of a father-son relationship in the shadow of old age, made with a large gloop of sentiment and the pranky comic energy of Saturday night TV.
Posted Jun 24, 2025
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4/5
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Elio
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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... The film doesn’t waste anyone’s time, while tackling forever urgent childhood themes: the mysteries of other kids, older kids, adults, yourself.
Posted Jun 24, 2025
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3/5
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28 Years Later
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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The story is grander and more expansive than what came before. Williams and Comer excel. Their part of the plot has real heft, tied up with time, loss and British childhood.
Posted Jun 21, 2025
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Return to Oz
(1985)
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Nigel Andrews
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The normally dazzling photographer David Watkin shoots the film in pasty, overcast colours, as if this return to Oz was strictly off-season like a visit to Brighton in November.
Posted Jun 20, 2025
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3/5
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Sally
(2025)
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Dan Einav
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But if Sally doesn’t quite reach the heights of its subject, it is fittingly unshowy. This is a quietly admiring tribute to a woman who lamented the fact that her historic achievement was still “such a big deal” in 1983.
Posted Jun 13, 2025
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4/5
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Tornado
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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With enough nerve and talent, wonders can be conjured with just a handful of figures and a few simple props, in the midst of a strange old country.
Posted Jun 13, 2025
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3/5
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Lollipop
(2024)
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Jonathan Romney
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Lollipop presses its case with impressive steeliness; clearly both lived and meticulously researched, it has an irreducible ring of the real.
Posted Jun 13, 2025
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2/5
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How to Train Your Dragon
(2025)
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Jonathan Romney
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The dialogue often gets lost amid all the roaring, clanging and heroic musical fanfares and the editing can be dizzyingly manic. What you miss is the streamlined clarity that made the original such a pleasure.
Posted Jun 13, 2025
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4/5
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Echo Valley
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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I’ll take the side of the kind of film that is neither the nth instalment of a franchise, nor fishing for an Oscar, but simply seeks to entertain while also giving you something to chew on. Echo Valley supplies just that.
Posted Jun 13, 2025
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4/5
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Titan: The OceanGate Disaster
(2025)
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Dan Einav
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For all the intriguing and terrifying insights about deep-sea adventuring that have drawn people to this story, the Titan disaster might be seen as a timely cautionary tale...
Posted Jun 09, 2025
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3/5
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Goebbels and the Führer
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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If Goebbels’ inner life is mostly just a maw of self-interest, the depth of his murderous antisemitism is also keenly felt.
Posted Jun 09, 2025
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3/5
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The Encampments
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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... An imperfect film that is still part of a history in progress and, as such, one you should see.
Posted Jun 09, 2025
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5/5
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The Piano Teacher
(2001)
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Danny Leigh
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The film still holds the same fraught charge it did a quarter of a century ago.
Posted Jun 09, 2025
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3/5
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Ballerina
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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You’re left with the uncomfortable sense that a female star and a sense of humour was judged a step too far for the audience. Still, just enough vim lingers from the earlier Wicks.
Posted Jun 04, 2025
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3/5
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Bono: Stories of Surrender
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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When the film premiered in Cannes, unkind critics saw it as self-celebratory. With Bono, that’s like complaining that the rain is wet. The flipside are the points when something raw is laid bare...
Posted Jun 04, 2025
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4/5
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The Ballad of Wallis Island
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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What you also don’t anticipate is how poignant it all gets — a melancholy farce with an oddly pure soul.
Posted Jun 04, 2025
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3/5
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The Salt Path
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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A tale of desperate penury that offers famous faces, gorgeous scenery and artful uplift, made to be seen in a boutique cinema.
Posted Jun 04, 2025
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4/5
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Mountainhead
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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The movie was only shot in March, a breakneck fast turnaround for filmmaking. The sense of right-here-right-now can lend the satire real sting.
Posted May 28, 2025
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4/5
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The History of Sound
(2025)
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Raphael Abraham
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With no tricksiness, no amplification and no unnecessary embellishment, it is allowed to resonate quietly and linger in the mind and ears, with no false notes.
Posted May 23, 2025
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3/5
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The Phoenician Scheme
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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Here, the movie has been sold as a tender tale of fathers and daughters. Hmm. It works better as a comedy of mid-century moguldom...
Posted May 23, 2025
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2/5
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Fountain of Youth
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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Only now and then does a car chase end in a long frantic spin to queasy effect, before the film settles back into its default mode — somehow both wholly undemanding and completely exhausting.
Posted May 22, 2025
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4/5
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The Chronology of Water
(2025)
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Raphael Abraham
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Stewart turns the intensity back up to maximum and mostly to good effect, though at time the stylistic tics tip over into self-conscious student film territory.
Posted May 19, 2025
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4/5
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Nouvelle Vague
(2025)
|
Raphael Abraham
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Yet even at its most irreverent — "Your film is a piece of shit," his fellow critics declare after the first screening — Linklater's mostly French-language, black-and-white homage remains deeply reverential.
Posted May 19, 2025
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4/5
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Die My Love
(2025)
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Raphael Abraham
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The beautiful princess may well have settled down with that handsome woodcutter at the edge of the forest, but until now we never saw what happened after she had a baby.
Posted May 19, 2025
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2/5
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Eddington
(2025)
|
Raphael Abraham
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What it boils down to is a big-screen amplification of a billion “WTF is going on?!” posts rather than any kind of coherent response to them.
Posted May 16, 2025
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5/5
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What They Found
(2025)
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Dan Einav
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While the footage speaks for itself, the commentary provided by Lewis and Lawrie provides a rare insight into what it felt like to see the unimaginable first-hand.
Posted May 15, 2025
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5/5
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Good One
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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But the familiar path to all-is-forgiven group hugs is the stuff of that less interesting film. This one has teeth.
Posted May 15, 2025
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4/5
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Deaf President Now!
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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No two signs look exactly the same. Such is one memorable lesson from the slick but powerful documentary Deaf President Now!
Posted May 15, 2025
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3/5
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Hallow Road
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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Even with two stars, Hallow Road’s economy of scale recalls the rash of single-actor films made after the 2008 financial crash.
Posted May 15, 2025
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4/5
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The Marching Band
(2024)
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Danny Leigh
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Warm and sure-footed, the film has the feel of a richly satisfying meal in an excellent neighbourhood bistro. Old world pleasures of character and story are generously apportioned.
Posted May 15, 2025
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3/5
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Mission: Impossible - The Final Reckoning
(2025)
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Danny Leigh
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This time round, everything is simply less fun. Callbacks to Missions past hint at elegy.
Posted May 14, 2025
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3/5
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The Assessment
(2024)
|
Jonathan Romney
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Written by Mrs & Mr Thomas (aka Nell Garfath-Cox and Dave Thomas), the film starts from a sharply focused premise, before turning increasingly wayward; it ends up feeling like a Black Mirror episode extended long beyond its punchline.
Posted May 09, 2025
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