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Free Solo
Outstanding Oscar-winning documentary of climber Alex Honnold’s solo, ropeless ascent of sheer 3000 feet El Capitan in Yosemite National Park. We watch the meticulous preparations and planning, the false starts and setbacks in a study of courage, skill and the single-mindedness of striving to achieve what no one else has. This crowd-pleasing doc with stunning…
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Faces Places
Unlikely couple 88 year-old director Agnes Varda and photographer and muralist JR (33) create a visual essay on the French in this quirkiest of road movies. Travelling throughout France with a box truck equipped with a portable photo booth and printing facility, they take photographs of the people they meet and places they see, and…
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The Pawnbroker
Rod Steiger (On the Waterfront, Dr Zhivago, In the Heat of the Night) launched a stellar career as a serious actor with his Oscar-nominated performance as an embittered concentration camp survivor running a pawnshop in 1960s Harlem. A powerful drama from director Sidney Lumet, who made some of Hollywood’s most visionary political/social dramas (12 Angry…
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Booksmart
Director Olivia Wilde’s debut feature film is a charming comedy that’s winning critical praise from top reviewers. On the eve of their high school graduation, two academic achievers and best girlfriends realise they should have worked less & played more. They decide to make up for lost time. On this slight premise Wilde builds a…
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Closely Watched Trains
Oscar-winning comedy-drama from Czech New Wave director and actor Jirí Menzel (Larks on a String, I served the King of England). Set in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during WWII, a shy clerk at a village train station fails in his first attempt at making-love, leaving him feeling inadequate and despondent, but eventually succeeds beyond his or anyone’s…
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Transit
Transit is based on a 1944 novel by German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers, who draws on her own experience as a refugee. Petzold situates the drama in an historically indeterminate moment, superimposing past and present. There are no period trappings; the opening sirens could be sounding today, and the soldiers storming Paris look like contemporary French…
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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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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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Honeyland
This surprise Sundance triple winner accompanies Hatidze Muratova, the last in a long line of wild beekeepers in northern Macedonia. The first film ever to be nominated for Oscars as both best documentary and best international feature film. Hatidze and her mother are the last inhabitants of an abandoned village in North Macedonia, where she…
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Saint Maud
A private nurse for palliative care is convinced that God has a special purpose in store for her. Her new client is a terminally ill choreographer whose cynical bohemianism jars and spars with her own ecstatic asceticism. 31-year old National Film & Television School graduate Rose Glass, who was working five years ago as an…