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Nathalie Rothschild
The Dictator: satirising America
Sacha Baron Cohen’s rollicking comedy about a tinpot tyrant is more a send-up of Americans than Arabs.
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| Thursday 26 April 2012 |
Patrick Hayes
Audience charming in the Yemen
Lasse Hallström’s rom-com serves up an appealingly fishy main with a side of political satire, but that only gets it so far.
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| Friday 20 April 2012 |
Tom Slater
The oddball charm of a Nazi-hunting goth
Packed full of intriguing characters, offbeat drama-comedy This Must Be The Place even manages to make Sean Penn likeable.
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| Monday 16 April 2012 |
Michael Baum
Where have all the pink dollars gone?
A new breast cancer-awareness doc is too focused on conspiracies to grasp the real travesty of ‘pink think’.
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| Friday 13 April 2012 |
Tom Slater
Taking Titanic seriously will end in disaster
Critics should forget the historical inaccuracies - James Cameron’s rereleased blockbuster is a naff weepy and nothing more.
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| Thursday 5 April 2012 |
Tom Slater
A life-affirming rhapsody on the death penalty
Werner Herzog’s poignant death-penalty documentary avoids didacticism in favour of unalloyed human experience.
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| Thursday 29 March 2012 |
Tom Slater
Have the Dardennes fallen off their bike?
The remarkable Belgian filmmaking duo have produced a string of gritty modern classics - this fluffier fairytale is their first flop.
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| Friday 23 March 2012 |
Tom Slater
Out of the darkness and into the light
It starts as a simplistic, sanitised take on the Holocaust, but finally In Darkness becomes the humanising film it needed to be.
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| Friday 16 March 2012 |
Tom Slater
Doing Hardy proud in modern India
Thanks to its Indian twist, Michael Winterbottom’s new take on Tess of the d'Urbervilles is no tired costume drama.
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| Friday 9 March 2012 |
Tom Slater
The best inoffensive film to watch with your parents
Yes, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel is unchallenging and cliché-ridden. But this bittersweet retiree romp remains a delight.
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| Thursday 23 February 2012 |
Nathalie Rothschild
Woody Allen and the perils of nostalgia
Midnight in Paris, about a novelist transported to the 1920s, shows Allen’s romantic imagination at its best.
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| Thursday 23 February 2012 |
Tom Slater
Making a fairytale of the First World War
He may have replaced the gore of war with the goo of War Horse, but somehow Spielberg pulls it off.
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| Wednesday 22 February 2012 |
Patrick Hayes
Terrence Malick is no Tarkovsky
The Oscar-nominated epic The Tree of Life is ambitious, but it takes more than ambition to make a masterpiece.
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| Monday 20 February 2012 |
Tom Slater
If they gave out Oscars for mediocrity...
Clooney is okay in The Descendants, but the rest of the movie is a shallow and schmaltzy affair.
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| Friday 10 February 2012 |
Tom Slater
Cartoonish characters can’t create true carnage
The paper-thin characters in Roman Polanski’s new film means this satire of middle-class mores quickly loses its bite.
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| Friday 3 February 2012 |
Tom Slater
If a film is this pretty, who cares if it’s true?
In Bombay Beach, Alma Har’el uses artistic licence to tell the melancholy tale of an abandoned wannabe boomtown.
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| Thursday 26 January 2012 |
David Bowden
The roots of the riots: found in translation
Forget British TV’s feeble attempts to explain urban disarray - look to Scandinavian drama instead.
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| Friday 20 January 2012 |
Tom Slater
What a Shame: taking sex addiction at face value
Steve McQueen’s latest film offers an unconvincing portrayal of a promiscuous yuppie at the mercy of his sexual urges.
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| Tuesday 17 January 2012 |
James Woudhuysen
Making a molehill out of a mountain
Clint Eastwood’s biopic of J Edgar Hoover is more about the man’s personal identity than his historical significance.
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| Friday 13 January 2012 |
Tom Slater
The Artist: giving film fans the silent treatment
Michel Hazanavicius’ black-and-white movie manages to be both a homage to Hollywood’s past and wittily original.
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