This lovely, full-blown epic fantasy tells its story in an unhurried and linear fashion. It manages to be simple, emotionally powerful and to engage with its deployment of fantasy elements.
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This showcase for the BFI National Archive comes a real cropper to its aesthetic pretensions.
Read moreA great story is ruined by a lo-fi pop-art treatment in this documentary about the last two years of Jayne Mansfield, the 1950s and 1960s sex symbol and actor.
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With its warm-hearted hearted message but stoical and lugubrious style, this film works hard and well to reinvent the western (in contemporary, rural Bulgaria!). It’s a lovely mood piece, which reins in the inevitable showdown nicely too.
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This wonderful supernatural fantasy is also a love song to the natural world and the traditional landscapes of Song Dynasty Chinese art.
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A compelling mix of Golden Age Hollywood glamour, inspirational story, drug addiction revelations and cosmetic surgery tragedy. Bombshell kicks off with a journalistic angle which adds drama and the documentary is interspersed with the memories of family members, which add tangible pathos.
Read moreAn icy and ambivalent domestic tragedy, set amongst the selfish and self-important Russian middle class. This is a film that fairly luxuriates in bad parenting, although it is also making a rather unsubtle point about materialism and selfishness in modern Russia, as we’ve come to expect from the director of Leviathan, Elena, The Banishment and The Return.
Read moreInappropriately gleeful, impassioned, intriguing and analytical, embrace your dark, inner geek with this documentary about the shower scene in Psycho. It re-invests the scene with much of the trauma the years have stripped from it and makes a good case for it being a key moment in cinema history
Read moreC (Affleck) and M (Mara) live together in a small suburban bungalow in Texas. After C dies in a car crash outside their home, he comes back to the bungalow as a ghost, a silent witness to M’s grieving process. When she moves out, the ghost finds itself anchored to the home, its disintegrating memories and experiences with the new tenants slowly giving way to something more cosmic.
Read moreOutrageous glow-in-the-dark American mythology weirdness, with engaging turns by all three leads and supporting names too.
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