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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Nicole Flattery |Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies |Simran Hans
Close to the end of Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, a documentary by Sinéad O’Shea, the writer and critic Andrew O’Hagan forms an assessment of O’Brien’s work. Her strength, he tells us, came from her ability “to embrace ambiguity, to see all around her”. He is referring specifically to her 1994 novel about the Troubles House of Splendid Isolation, but he could be talking about any of her books, including her scandalous debut The Country Girls.
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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Philip KempReviews |Philip Kemp |Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies
Alex Garland and Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza’s rigorous re-enactment of the 2006 Ramadi incident is a powerful depiction of combat but leaves little space for the audience to connect with its characters.
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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Samuel Thomas Davies |Ben Nicholson |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel
Using the couple’s own tape recordings and a patchwork of archive clips, Kevin Macdonald takes an intriguing show-don’t-tell approach to the first 18 months of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s move to New York in late 1971. 11 April 2025When John Lennon and Yoko Ono left the stately pile of Tittenhurst Park outside Ascot to move into a modest tworoom apartment on Bank Street in New York’s West Village, they installed a TV at the foot of the bed, got in, and never turned it off.
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1 week ago | 
bfi.org.uk | Ben Nicholson |Samuel Thomas Davies |Simran Hans |Anton Bitel
Uberto Pasolini trades a fantastic voyage for an intense portrait of a marriage as the long-suffering Odysseus, played by Ralph Fiennes, returns from the Trojan War. 11 April 2025Uberto Pasolini’s reworking of The Odyssey shuns spectacle to craft a potent, grown-up character study that mines the emotional core of Homer’s epic.
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Oct 13, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kim Newman |Kate Stables |Jessica Kiang |Samuel Thomas Davies
‘Salem’s Lot (1975), Stephen King’s second novel, imposes the plot of Dracula onto the small-town-with-festering-secrets tradition of Peyton Place. The book has been as influential on contemporary horror as Dracula was – among the many works inspired by it are Peter Straub’s novel Ghost Story and Mike Flanagan’s streaming miniseries Midnight Mass (2021).
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Oct 11, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Kate Stables |Jessica Kiang |Samuel Thomas Davies |Neil Young
Death becomes Alice Lowe. Strictly in creative terms, of course. Whether co-creating caravanning serial-killers in 2012’s Sightseers, or starring in her directorial debut, the antenatal comedy-slasher Prevenge (2016), Lowe’s work has always been gleefully gruesome. Here, she’s dying for love as writer-director-star of a dreamily macabre comedy, in which the obsessive Agnes finds herself locked in a time-skipping doomed love story, set to repeat through the ages.
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Oct 8, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Jessica Kiang Festivals |Jessica Kiang |Samuel Thomas Davies |Neil Young
It comes in with the breath and never comes out, the dread that lives in your chest from the first, uncanny scene of Déa Kulumbegashvili’s severe and brilliant April, incredibly only her second film after her debut masterpiece Beginning (2020). The dread is like a toxin polluting the damp fields and changeable skies of the Georgian countryside in spring – not that summer will bring relief.
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Oct 4, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Samuel Thomas Davies |Kate Stables |Roger Luckhurst |Nick Bradshaw
In February 1961, the jazz singer Abbey Lincoln and drummer Max Roach gatecrashed the UN Security Council to protest against the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s first post-independence prime minister. In a decade of seismic protest, it’s an incident that might seem a fleeting early tremor.
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Sep 24, 2024 | 
bfi.org.uk | Adam Nayman |Samuel Thomas Davies |Neil Young |Jessica Kiang
Every horror movie needs a gimmick: Oddity has enough for an entire mini-series. The pleasure of Irish-writer-director Damian McCarthy’s film lies in its brazen stockpiling of images and ideas borrowed from other genre efforts, to the point that it feels like a kind of cabinet of curiosities – i.e. exactly the sort of thing that its heroine, Darcy (Carolyn Bracken) would sell in her eerie little small-town antique store.
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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.
