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Jan 13, 2025 | 
filmcomment.com | Chris Shields |Sarah Fensom
This article appeared in the January 10, 2025 edition of The Film Comment Letter, our free weekly newsletter featuring original film criticism and writing. Sign up for the Letter here. Cutter’s Way (Ivan Passer, 1981)In 2024, Best Buy, the ubiquitous big-box consumer technology retailer, began phasing out DVDs and Blu-rays from its stores.
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Oct 29, 2024 | 
mubi.com | Chris Shields
At the end of a long corridor, a door creaks open to reveal a blinding light and a thick fog. The figure of a woman appears, as if from the beyond. Foreboding organ music accompanies her sashay toward us, cobwebs breaking against her ample curves.
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Jul 28, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | James Lattimer Festivals |James Lattimer |Kim Newman |Chris Shields
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s About Dry Grasses premiered at Cannes in 2023, a few days after a closely run, ideologically charged Turkish election which threw up questions about the country’s future course.
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Jul 26, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kim Newman |Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Samuel Thomas Davies
Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, was initially a parody of DC comics villain Slade Wilson, aka Deathstroke, who has featured in live-action and animated films and TV shows but has long since been eclipsed in pop culture by the comedy cover version. If another massive IP amalgamation takes place, there’d be mileage in a grudge fight between the licensed jester of Marvel and his presumably fed-up inspiration.
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Jul 26, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Daniella Alconaba |Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Samuel Thomas Davies
As a summer of sports crowds our screens, with Wimbledon and the European Championship passing the baton to the Olympic Games, Younger documents the personal lives of four female athletes over 60, celebrating another side to a traditionally youth-focused sporting world. Metal clanks in Younger’s opening scene as Joylyn, a lifelong runner, cumbersomely unloads medals, plaques and trophies won from tournaments. Red ribbons cover the floor, entangled as if to form one colossal achievement.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Katie McCabe |Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Katie McCabeReviews
A special dread runs through Annie Baker’s Janet Planet, the kind that burrows into the mind of a child during summer, when oceans of time appear in place of the usual routines, and loneliness creeps in. For 11-year-old Lacy (Zoe Ziegler), that time is spent anxiously observing her mother Janet as she moves through relationships in their countercultural western Massachusetts milieu over some quietly eventful weeks in 1991.
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Jul 23, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Chris Shields |Ben Walters |Samuel Thomas Davies |Carmen Gray
In Tatiana Huezo’s latest feature, The Echo, darkly rich natural imagery and crystalline sound combine to create a poetically forceful impression of the small Mexican village that gives the film its name. Between the landscapes we see and the sounds we hear – of galloping hooves, bleating animals and distant thunder – human narratives wriggle in, highlighting the role of women in a rural society that seems to exist somewhere outside time.
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Jun 20, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Anton Bitel |Nick James |Chris Shields
“I have lost my faith,” says actor Tom (Adrian Pasdar), highlighting the line in the script (provisionally titled The Georgetown Project) that he holds in his hands. He walks through – indeed does a walkthrough of – a house that is also visibly a giant set on a soundstage. Reaching the upper floor’s bedroom, he shouts “I cast thee out, Molech!” and, looking at the script, summarises: “Then she barfs, she screams, and I die.” Moments later, under apparent supernatural assault, Tom does in fact die.
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Jun 18, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Nick James |Chris Shields |Simran Hans
Inside Out (2015), Pixar’s best film of the last 15 years, built its story around a model of the human psyche that was both lucid and playful, centering on the interactions between five personified emotions – Joy, Sadness, Anger, Fear and Disgust – who direct the moods of its preteen protagonist Riley. The elegance of its premise was capped by the simplicity of its ending, in which Joy and Sadness learn to collaborate in shaping the girl’s inner life.
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Jun 15, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Arjun Sajip |Chris Shields |Simran Hans |Adam Nayman
You can glean a lot of wisdom from a three-minute folk song: Bob Dylan’s ‘Who Killed Davey Moore?’ (1963) is a case in point. Drawing on the recent death of Moore, a featherweight boxer who succumbed to injuries sustained in the ring, each verse summons a different stakeholder – manager, referee, journalist, viewer – who defiantly dodges responsibility for Moore’s demise. The lesson is clear: everyone is to blame, so no one is.
