I didn't watch this because it's St Patrick's Day today, but as it turns out it's St Patrick's Day today. Well this has every bit the kind of fond and loving evocation of Ireland that Netflix's A Castle for Christmas had for Scotland -- I do not believe that any of the central cast, whether they are playing Irish or not, are actually Irish -- except unlike that other film, this is less good. Yes, just to be clear I…
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The Nature of Love 2023
I like Monia Chokri's filmmaking style. I watched Babysitter just recently and this new film of hers has perhaps a little less of the frenetic quality of that earlier film, but it feels soulful in a way that is very redolent of serious 70s movies about relationships. The use of little zooms to punctuate the film, along with the colours and the way the actors move around one another and the camera circles them feels very like a way of…
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Urban Rashomon 2013
It seems to me that a lot of photographer/director Khalik Allah's work is about the ethics of documenting poverty. In this short piece we see him capturing images of a street person called Frenchie, while the director reflects in voiceover about his borderline exploitative relationship with his subject. It's a film of beautiful images but also is very upfront about the ways in which representation is manipulation and exploitation, which is refreshing.
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Vice 2018
In some ways, when I watch something like Vice (or indeed, writer/director Adam McKay's last film The Big Short), I think of David O. Russell's American Hustle or even the flashier Martin Scorsese of, say, Wolf of Wall Street, both of which films I broadly liked (although I'm cooling on the Russell over time). I think there's a lot of common ground, as comedic renderings of modern society in all its gaudiness and compromised politics, and perhaps there's a fine…