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Loving Vincent
“We cannot speak other than by our paintings,“ wrote Vincent van Gogh in the week before his death. This innovative biopic takes him at his word. Live actors mesh seamlessly with paintings in the style of the artist to illuminate the circumstances of his tragic demise. Reluctantly at first, the son of the local postman…
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Loveless
Andrei Zvyagintsev (Leviathan, Elena, The Return) has created a blistering winter’s tale, with a disintegrating marriage and the disappearance of a child at its emotional pivot. The broader picture is of the implacable forces tearing apart contemporary Russia, with the personal calamity casting everything into sharper relief. Setting the scene, the camera sketches an apocalyptic…
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Written on the Wind
Based on a 1945 novel, Written on the Wind is a thinly-disguised account of a real-life scandal, with names, location and key details such as the source of the wealth of the family involved changed. Dismissed on release as glossy and over-the-top, its reputation has since grown along with that of its director Douglas Sirk,…
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Lady Bird
Does the world need another coming-of-age story with a mother/daughter conflict? – When the director and cast are this talented, the answer is yes. Saoirse Ronan (24), in the title role, made her searing debut in Atonement. Schoolmates are played by Lucas Hedges (21) and Timothée Chalamet (22), outstanding in Manchester by the Sea and…
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Graduation
Leading light of the Romanian New Wave Cristian Mungiu (whose 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, also shown by WFC, won the 2007 Palme d’Or) directs this gripping morality tale starring Romanian stage and screen actor Adrian Titieni as Dr Romeo Aldea and Maria Dragus (the priest’s daughter in The White Ribbon) as his…
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Letters from Baghdad
Explorer and mountaineer, linguist and archaeologist, the Middle East expert Gertrude Bell was recruited by British military intelligence to help draw the borders of Iraq after WWI. Arguably the most powerful woman in the British Empire in her day, she was at the same time an impassioned proponent of the region’s cultural heritage and defended…
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Blade Runner – The Final Cut
It’s 2018 and LA is a dystopian urban sprawl. Rick Deckard (Ford) is a blade runner or bounty hunter of replicants. Created by the Tyrell Corporation replicants are androids almost indistinguishable from humans. They are illegal on Earth after a bloody mutiny on an off-world colony, yet six Nexus replicants have purposefully made their way…
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The Servant
The first of three film collaborations with the American director, Harold Pinter’s screenplay adapts a 1948 novel by Robin Maugham, pen name of the 2nd Viscount Maugham (1916–1981). Educated at Eton, Maugham followed in the steps of his uncle W. Somerset Maugham to pursue a career in writing. As fascism spread across 1930s Europe, he…
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Tom of Finland
Award-winning director Thomas ‘Dome’ Karukoski, one of Finland’s most successful film-makers, brings to the big screen the life, work and times, from the 1940s through the 1980s, of one man who influenced a generation – homoerotic artist Touko Laaksonen, aka Tom of Finland (Pekka Strang). Respected critic Markus Maattanen has described Dome Karukoski as “the…