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The Salvation – LFF Review

The Salvation launches into action with a tense and life-changing encounter for Jon (Mikkelsen) and his family. Unfortunately, from there the plot becomes increasingly ludicrous and lightweight. The...
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Mommy – LFF Review

Most filmmakers can only dream of having made five features and winning the Jury Prize at Cannes by the age of 25. Most filmmakers aren’t Xavier Dolan. With Mommy he shows off his frighteningly assured...
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Whiplash – LFF Review

At the heart of Whiplash lies an uncomfortable truth, relentlessly hammered home with the force of a thousand drumbeats. To be truly great at anything you need to work till you bleed, work until you hate...
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Hungry Hearts – LFF Review

Is it possible to love not too little but too well? This is the question posed by Saverio Costanzo’s incisive and inquisitive script that follows the battle of wills as Jude (Driver) and Mina (Rohrwacher)...
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The Immortalists – LFF Review

It’s ironic that a film about living forever is so insufferable it makes you want to kill yourself. Sussberg and Alvarado openly laugh at the deluded follies of the oddball scientists trying to cure aging...
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Leviathan – LFF Review

Zvyagintsev’s direction builds small character moments into a powerful story of corruption, betrayal and despair. This is Russia, and it’s not pretty. Farcical comedy clashes with the downtrodden hopes...
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Phoenix – LFF Review

If you’ve got the cheek to basically rehash Vertigo in post-war Germany then the result better be good. This isn’t. Criminally devoid of drama or character developments, Petzold and Farocki’s script...
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War Book – LFF Review

You face a decision. You will kill millions. Or, you will watch the world burn around you. Sick to your guts you feel the cold dread of a desperately uncertain future. It’s time to decide. The premise...
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Pasolini – LFF Review

A love letter from one provocauteur to another, written in dried blood and tired philosophy. Dafoe is assured as the controversial director, both in his tentative physicality and his soaring creative...
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Listen Up Philip – LFF Review

Philip (Schwartzman) is the man you'll love to hate. Ike (Pryce) is the man he could become. They are both tortured, selfish literary geniuses and Moss, Ritter and de La Baume are the women who suffer for...
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Shrew’s Nest – LFF Review

Shrew’s Nest is a shrieking bloody mess of a film that just about clings onto enough sanity to tell a compelling and sinister story. Montse (Gómez) is too afraid to leave her house and when an injured...
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Dancing Arabs – LFF Review

Dancing Arabs’s greatest strength is the way it recognises and respects the painfully irreconcilable divide between opposing cultures – in this case Israel and Palestine. There is kindness and humanity...
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Spring – LFF Review

Death leads to dubious love in this endlessly inventive delight that pays no regard to traditional genre boundaries. Directors Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead send bereaved lead Evan (Lou Taylor Pucci) on...