Popular reviews

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe 8

  film school in england seems like a lotta work. film school in america is mostly just makin a bad movie trailer about a radiohead song a few months after you hear radiohead for the first time

  Just stellar. Haven’t seen a sequel like this in so long, so justified as a proper ending to a story and not just a “continuation” of it. Some scenes were a truly affecting in their resonance; I commented afterwards to someone how it’s always a strange but unifying experience to watch a piece of art that depicts an experience you once considered unique. I felt a great hmm after watching The Souvenir a few years back but this second part made me want to revisit it, and I’d recommend anyone revisit it before watching the sequel. Also, you get more Richard Ayoade, so- it’s better!

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★★★½

  Joanna Hogg’s miraculous 2019 cine-memoir “The Souvenir” ends with its posh, navel-gazing, and newly grief-stricken heroine — a 25-year-old film student in 1980s London — standing on the precipice of herself. Her name is Julie Harte, she’s played by Honor Swinton Byrne with the raw honesty of someone feeling her way through a solar eclipse, and she’s following in Hogg’s uncertain footsteps with the shaky confidence of someone who’s seen “I Know Where I’m Going!” enough times to convince herself that she might. She even lives in an immaculate re-creation of the writer-director’s former apartment, built on a soundstage and surrounded by massive blow-ups of the photos Hogg once snapped through the windows of that flat.

  Julie has been rattled…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★½

  "Did you resist the urge to be obvious?"

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  Review by iana ★★★★½

  oh i absolutely adored this. joanna hogg carefully unpacks her trauma and grief in a gorgeous, sensitive and surprisingly meta sequel. and richard ayoade!!

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★★

  I want to write about this film more in-depth before the end of the year, but I also want to say a bit now because I really hope people get a chance to see it in theaters.

  + I came away from The Souvenir pretty shaken up, having been sold on it as "about grad school and having a rude boyfriend," which, well, okay lol, but [Dakota Johnson voice] that's not true. I can see why the addiction through line is not front and center in the marketing, but it was for me, at the time, a profoundly... dare I say... it's my Letterboxd, so... "triggering" aspect of the first feature. between this and 2018's A Star Is Born there…

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  Review by Jay ★★½ 12

  honor swinton byrne: mother can have £10000

  tilda swinton: yes dear

  richard ayoade: *duel wields cigarettes*

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  Review by fran hoepfner ★★★★★ 4

  Did you avoid the temptation to be obvious?

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  Review by IsabelSandoval ★★★★ 1

  A self-reflexive marvel of rebirth and artistic invention. Loved it more than the first.

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  Review by Ben Empey ★★★★ 1

  i was thrilled to get a follow up on tilda’s ceramics class

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  Review by Katie Walsh 3

  A stone-cold masterpiece about a stone-cold masterpiece. 

  trigger warning: film school

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  Review by Laura 4

  “you’re a human being with life to live — that’s your job.”

  simultaneously fell in love with this & became more forgiving of part i. it is vital for us to stew in our own memories & creations. and making artifacts is one of the few things we can do that binds the past, present, and future. they become braided together. it both relieves us of our mistakes and reminds us of our naïveté, which we can never fully outgrow. 

  honestly a little surprised at how much this hit me. mostly unexplainable. but made me feel aware of all the bits of myself that i’d let go quiet. maybe there’s something there worth revisiting.

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  Review by theriverjordan ★★★★½ 34

  What do you do with the most cutting shards of glass; broken from a mirror that once contained your self-image at the moment of experiencing its greatest sorrow? 

  You make those broken pieces into art. 

  It’s these fragments that comprise Joanna Hogg’s “The Souvenir: Part II.” Hogg, though, does not wear kiddie gloves in the handling of the parts of her past that should slice through less hardened hands. These are the hands of a filmmaker; well-calloused against all variety of critique and derision. Including, the director’s own. 

  “Part II” swerves between posh country home and reverberating sound stage. It smears blood on the face of tragedy, and laughs at the pleasure of doing so. Hogg so eloquently captures the…