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'Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones' (2014) directed by Christopher Landon
Everybody knows that it's the fifth film in a horror franchise that really brings the critical acclaim. It's a bit disappointing Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones seems a little bashful about its...
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'The Secret Life of Walter Mitty' (2013) directed by Ben Stiller
The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is a film torn between the twin poles, sincerity versus against commerce. The central figure of Walter Mitty, a nebbish fantasist who lapses into daydreams as a coping...
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'The Railway Man' (2013) directed by Jonathan Teplitzky
The Railway Man is a handsomely decked out film. Telling an inspirational true story of triumph over hatred in a particularly dark moment of the 20th century, complete with CG vistas of wars, a...
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'American Psycho: A New Musical Thriller' at the Almeida Theatre, 18th...
American Psycho is a chaotic ocean of brand names, cocaine, pop, dissection, high finance and rape. As a window into the mind of a monster Bret Easton Ellis' 1991 novel is practically peerless, giving...
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'Jake and Dinos Chapman: Come and See' at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery
Glistening viscera oozes from executed innocents. SS Kommandos furiously fuck on a carpet of dismemberment. Mengele-warped human perversions stagger through the chaos. Driven mad by his mutilation a...
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'Last Vegas' (2013) directed by John Turtletaub
The nicest thing I can say about Last Vegas is that it isn’t quite as bad as it so obviously should be. High praise indeed for a film that takes De Niro, a titan of cinema if there ever was one, and...
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'Her' (2013) directed by Spike Jonze
In Her, a man falls passionately and sincerely in love with his computer. As a society we have long passed the point of no return with technology: our smartphones, tablets, laptops and computers a...
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'Exposed: Beyond Burlesque' (2013) directed by Beth B
Beth B's Exposed: Beyond Burlesque totally demolishes the notion of burlesque as merely 'stripping that's acceptable in the middle classes'. The performers here spend their lives at the extreme end of...
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'Kelly + Victor' (2013) directed by Kieran Evans
Ever been punched in the face by a lover? Had crimson talons raked down your back? Felt the cool sting as your palm strikes wobbling, gasping flesh? If so then Kelly + Victor will tread familiar...
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'12 Years a Slave' (2013) directed by Steve McQueen
12 Years a Slave is a precision-engineered piece of machinery designed to impress upon an audience exactly what slavery means. Through the terrifying story of Solomon Northup we get an unflinching...
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Visiting the set of 'Belle': twisted psychological horror courtesy of the...
It’s real easy to criticise. To spend a pleasurable thousand or so words disembowelling the product of gallons of perspiration, innumerable minute artistic decisions and the singular passion of a...
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'Journal De France' (2013) directed by Raymond Depardon & Claudine Nougaret
A nondescript van snakes through the lanes and squares of Anywhere, France. A man climbs out and painstakingly erects a tripod, upon which he perches an enormous obsolete camera. He waits, gazing at...
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'Belle' (2014) directed by Jon Max Spatz
In Belle we see a woman confronted with obsolescence. It's the morning of the sixteenth birthday of her beautiful daughter, Belle and time has come a-knockin' for her mother. In painful scenes she,...
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'Inside Llewyn Davis' (2013) directed by Joel & Ethan Coen
Inside Llewyn Davis is the story of a folk music Sisyphus. Swaddled in corduroy, guitar strapped to his back he pushes a boulder up a mountain, inch by painful inch. When he reaches the top the...
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'Dallas Buyers Club' (2013) directed by Jean-Marc Vallée
The first thing we see in Dallas Buyers Club is a rodeo cowboy struggling to stay atop a bull. It's shot in tight close-ups of its blank eyes, heaving flanks and bulging muscles: every tactic in the...
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'The Wolf of Wall Street' (2013) directed by Martin Scorsese
In The Wolf of Wall Street Martin Scorsese elevates financial trading to a dark religion that promises heaven on earth. This is a story of mystical market forces, primal chest-beating, mind-bending...
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'The Choreography of Things', meeting Choy Ka Fai at arebyte Gallery, 18...
A century ago the Victorians, obsessed with touching the spiritual plane, seized upon electrification as the key to reviving the dead. Mary Shelley describes her "extreme astonishment" with the...
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'Cabinet of Curiosities: How Disability was Kept in a Box' by Mat Fraser at...
The Royal College of Physicians reeks of power and importance. Walk through the doors and you're judged by a jury of dead men; wigged, white and well-bred they gaze sternly down from the walls at you...
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'The General' (1926) directed by Buster Keaton & Clyde Bruckman
It's tough getting people to watch a silent comedy. There's a mountain of preconceptions that come with these things, namely that silent comedy is dull, long and, by today's standards, technically...
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'Hannah Arendt' (2012) directed by Margarethe von Trotta
In 1961 Hannah Arendt attended the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem and coined the phrase "the banality of evil". That straightforward, iconic phrase quickly came to define one of the most...
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