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Get Carter
A low-budget, British crime thriller that has become a cult classic.
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For Sama
Waad Al-Kateab started filming as a “citizen journalist” for Channel 4 News and won awards for her contribution to the series “Inside Aleppo.” (online at http://www.insidealeppo.com/ ) The 21-year old economics student first used a mobile phone, graduated to a camera and occasionally borrowed a drone. Friends’ amusement at her preoccupation changed when one of
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Philadelphia
For a decade after it was identified, victims of HIV faced early death, treated like pariahs while the virus ravaged the gay community. Philadelphia was the first major film to address the related issues of HIV, homophobia and discrimination and is widely credited with changing the national discourse. Tri-Star Pictures banked on celebrity director Demme,
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Drive
Accounts differ over how they came to collaborate on Drive, but Refn and Gosling both describe their close relationship as “telekinetic.” Their greatest difference is that Refn can’t drive. Most of the film is shot with wide-angle lenses. “I want you to see what’s behind the actor, what’s going on behind the character action,” says
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Love Affair
Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, and then… Often cited, most famously in Sleepless in Seattle, this instant hit was twice remade: in 1957 with Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr, Cathleen Nesbitt; and in 1994 with Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Katherine Hepburn. McCarey, who directed the first two, was a key figure in 1930’s Hollywood, mainly
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The Farewell
In 2013, Chinese-American director Lulu Wang was told that her grandmother (‘Nai Nai’ in Chinese) had Stage 4 lung cancer with three months to live. The family decided not to tell Nai Nai of the diagnosis and devised a ruse — a fast-tracked wedding in her hometown Changchun —for everyone to see her one last
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Queen & Slim
A Tinder date gone wrong is the springboard for a tense yet romantic road-trip evoking Bonnie & Clyde, set against the backdrop of contemporary racial injustices in the USA. It stars two Brits: Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya, born in London of Ugandan parents, who won the BAFTA Rising Star Award in 2018; and Jodie
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Bait
Named by critic Mark Kermode as the best film of the last decade and holder of the record of most ever votes received in a WFC Members’ Choice vote, this quirky drama wowed critics who hailed it as an instant masterpiece. The culture / class clash between locals and well-heeled outsiders forms the heart of
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The Personal History of David Copperfield
Dickens’ works tend to be adapted as serials, which is how he wrote them; the last cinema version of David Copperfield appeared over 50 years ago. The format imposes difficult choices: what to include, compress or omit? how to handle the novel’s first-person narrative and autobiographic perspective? Blackwell and Iannucci are both Dickens enthusiasts, and
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Birds of Passage
The origins of the Colombian drug trade, as seen through the eyes of an indigenous family from the matrilineal Wayúu tribe, residing in the remote northern desert region of Guajira, who become involved in the booming business of selling marijuana to American youth in the 1970s. Birds of Passage embraces the Wayúu language, traditions, rituals and










