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Minari – movie review

A slow burn drama with comedic elements, Minari weaves its magic over time. The film follows an immigrant family having a hard time of things. We’re in 1980s America. Jacob (Steven Yuen) is an accomplished chicken sexer who works fast, distinguishing the male chicks from the females. It’s a job he’s had for a decade,…

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The People Upstairs – movie review

Director Cesc Gay adapts his own play in The People Upstairs, a dry comedy whose dialogue-heavy approach sublimely reveals shifting relationship dynamics. The film takes place entirely in a modern, slick apartment occupied by long-time couple Ana (Griselda Siciliani) and Julio (Javier Cámara). After 15 years, their relationship has grown stale which manifests itself with…

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Another Round – movie review

Danish drinking culture is put under the microscope in Another Round, the new feature from director Thomas Vinterberg, an adherent of Lars Von Trier’s Dogme school of filmmaking. Mads Mikkelsen reunites with Vinterberg, who directed him in The Hunt. That was a tense drama about a teacher falsely accused of molesting a student. Here plays…

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The Food Club – movie review

In this low key Danish/Italian co-production, shot largely in Italy, three women in their sixties rediscover love and the joy of life. The Food Club (aka Madklubben) is a gentle film about friendship, getting old, getting to rediscover yourself and the joys of life, sex and good food. Friends since adolescence, Marie, Vanya and Berling…

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Only The Animals – movie review

Only The Animals surprised me. This remarkably well-constructed French mystery-thriller is three stories in one. Alice Farange (Laure Calamy) is in a loveless marriage in rural France. She’s having an affair with a strange loner named Joseph Bonnefille (Damien Bonnard), who barely tolerates her. Then Bonnefille seemingly callously ditches her giving no reason. There’s a…

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End of the Century – movie review

A gay Sliding Doors with subtitles? End of the Century is essentially a two-handed drama which serves up a meditation on relationships, the choices we make, and the fallibility of memory. Ocho (Juan Barberini), a fortysomething Argentine poet from New York on holiday in Barcelona, meets Javi (Ramon Pujol), a Berlin-based producer of a children’s…

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How to be a Good Wife – movie review

French cinematic touchstones and a powerful feminist message merge in Martin Provost’s How to be a Good Wife. This slightly bonkers film traverses similar ground to Philippa Lowthorpe’s Misbehaviour, and does it with a similarly entertaining flair. But it also leans heavily into the traditions of French farce. Provost’s previous film was the far more…

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