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Woman at War
Filmed, like the director’s debut Of Horses and Men, by cinematographer Bergsteinn Björgúlfsson, Woman at War sets highland landscapes against home comforts, no-holds-barred environmentalist activism against inner peace, the ethos of earth mother versus the joys and responsibilities of mother-and-child. Erlingsson challenges us to juggle multiple realities at once, as his heroine Halla attempts to
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Rocks
Teenage Shola, Rocks to her classmates, battles to care for herself and her younger brother after they are abandoned by their single mother. Director Sarah Gavron and writers Theresa Ikoko and Claire Wilson forsake the usual hierarchies of the film-making process and empower their cast to tell their story in their own words and way.
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Minari
“Minari is a story of the American Dream. But Chung’s brilliance is in how he adds depth and complexity to those foundational ideas – it’s in the spaces in between that we find love, loss, hope, and regret.” Clarisse Loughrey, Independent
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Breathless
A classic of the French New Wave, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless) was Godard’s debut feature film, a career breakthrough for Belmondo and a career recovery for Seberg after her travails in Otto Preminger’s Saint Joan and Bonjour Tristesse.
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Sometimes Always Never
Bill Nighy stars as an eccentric ex-tailor searching for his estranged son. The theme is strained relationships, but enacted through the British fondness for slightly absurd rituals of conflict, here in the form of high-stakes Scrabble.
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After Love
After Love is essentially a chamber piece about grief that has been expanded out across boundaries both literal and figurative.
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Blind Ambition
An audience favourite at festivals, Blind Ambition ticks all the boxes for a feelgood underdog documentary, but the film’s popularity rests on more than dramatic clichés and familiar tropes about competitive spirit. It reflects a multi-faceted tale of refugees, urban violence and the eurocentrism of tasting (e.g. requiring a familiarity with strawberries), as much as
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Hit The Road
Debut writer/director Panah Panahi is inevitably described as ‘the son of Jafar Panahi’; he has acknowledged that fear of being compared to his famous father “completely paralysed me for years”. Jafar learned his craft working as the assistant of celebrated Iranian auteur Abbas Kiarostami – Panah remembers learning as a child from both filmmakers, “sitting
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Benediction
A non-conventional film biography of the poet Siegfried Sassoon (Jack Lowden), Benediction spans three distinct eras: the horror and waste of World War I, and the poetry it gave rise to; the interwar years of “gay” society (and covert homosexuality); and finally the 1960s, where we see the elderly poet, played by Peter Capaldi, attempt
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The Quiet Girl
The debut feature film from the Irish documentary maker Colm Bairéad has earned plaudits both in Ireland and abroard, culminating in its nomination for the 2023 Academy Awards (Best International Film category). Bairéad both wrote the screenplay, based on the 2010 English-language novella Foster by Irish writer Claire Keegan, and directed the film, and his










