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La Mélodie – Venice 2017 Review

Generally the first exposure to foreign film for a British child is in a French lesson towards the end of term. Over the last decade or so, 2004’s The Chorus and the 2008 Palme d’Or winner The...
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Lean On Pete – Venice 2017 Review

Full of wide, near-barren vistas and trying to fit three different films into one, Andrew Haigh’s Lean on Pete has all the hallmarks of a Brit director’s first foray to America. It gets lost in the...
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Human Flow – Venice 2017 Review

Mass migration is one of the biggest international crises of the last decade, with more people displaced now than at any point since the end of World War 2. As artist and activist Ai Weiwei's documentary...
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The Insult – Venice 2017

A courtroom drama, a study of masculinity in crisis, and a treatise on the geopolitical state of modern Lebanon, Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult has tonnes of ambition, but lacks the focus and intensity needed...
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Zama – Venice 2017 Review

"White guys go crazy in the South American jungle" is a well-worn genre at this point. From Werner Herzog’s one-two of Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo, to more modern spins Embrace of the Serpent and The Lost City...
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Downsizing – Venice 2017 Review

Alexander Payne kicks off the 2017 Venice Film Festival with a strange, ambitious, and often pummellingly downbeat story. After Norwegian scientists make the miraculous breakthrough of cellular miniaturisation...