Cinema
The Manchester Review

Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 6, 7 & 8 | reviewed by Peter Wild

Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 6, 7 & 8 In the last of our short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we skip merrily from Japan to China, then head on to France and Brazil, before finally ending up in New Orleans. We begin with a late night showing […]

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The Manchester Review

Manchester International Film Festival – Days 3, 4, & 5 | reviewed by Peter Wild

Manchester International Film Festival (MANIFF) – Days 3, 4 & 5 In the second of a short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we hopscotch our way through Christopher Nolan’s Memento, Roy’s World, a documentary about the author Barry Gifford, a pair of directorial debuts separated by a couple of decades: […]

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The Manchester Review

Manchester International Film Festival – Day 1 & 2 | reviewed by Peter Wild

Manchester International Film Festival – Day 1 & 2 In the first of a short series of reviews from this year’s Manchester International Film Festival, we cover days 1 and 2 of the festival… The festival opens with an opening night gala premiere for Traumfabrik, a romantic drama set in Berlin in 1961 (and France […]

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The Manchester Review

HarmonieBand | Berlin: Symphony of a Great City | reviewed by David Adamson

HarmonieBand presents Berlin: Symphony of a Great City | HOME, Manchester 1982 European Cup winners Aston Villa have a song that goes, “Aston Villa FC / We’re by far the greatest team the world has ever seen”. Now, I’m all for the occasional self-congratulation, but history – and that slippery adjective – have a way […]

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The Manchester Review

Sunset Boulevard reviewed by David Adamson

Sunset Boulevard | HOME | Manchester Now, it is 2019, and Hollywood is a humourless place. Caught between wanting to appear serious about contemporary issues while not taking itself too seriously, it finds itself lurching between a politician’s earnest, pained brow and that fevered, rictus grin that Cherie Blair used to wear in public engagements. […]

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David Hartley

Possum | HOME | reviewed by David Hartley

Possum | HOME | November 1st There was a sense of slight apology in Matthew Holness’s introduction to Possum to the gathered audience at HOME’s event screening this week. Known for his cult comedy hit Garth Marengi’s Darkplace, Holness wanted it clear from the start that his debut feature film was in no way comedic […]

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David Hartley

Peterloo| HOME | reviewed by David Hartley

UK Premier of Peterloo | HOME | October 17th There was something dizzying about watching Peterloo mere metres from the site of the massacre itself, which commemorates its 200th anniversary next year. The magisterial glow of Manchester seem to shine from between the bricks with just a little more intensity after I came blinking out […]

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The Manchester Review

Araf, dir. Didem Pekün, reviewed by Dr. Clara Dawson

Stills from ‘Araf’, courtesy of artist, 2018. Araf | Berlinale Film Festival | Forum Expanded For the 13th year of its running, the Forum Expanded of Berlinale (14-26 February) took the title ‘A Mechanism Capable of Changing itself’, inviting expressions and explorations from documentary filmmakers of the specific agency of cinema. The curatorial team consisted […]

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David Hartley

Get Out, dir. Jordan Peele, reviewed by David Hartley

What makes Jordan Peele’s Get Out such a curiosity is the strangeness that comes of its organic genre blending. The film feels like it began life as a comedy, evolved into a dark comedy, then evolved again into a horror thriller with a kitschy edge of comedy constantly echoing in. It feels cultivated rather than […]

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David Hartley

Call Me By Your Name, dir. Luca Guadagnino, reviewed by David Hartley

I’ve often thought that if the Academy wanted to expand their award categories, a statuette for Best Scene would make for an intriguing accolade. Sometimes a film offers up a moment so exquisite and affecting it can feel as if it is embedding itself deep inside within you, never to be shaken. My case-in-point last […]

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David Hartley

Dunkirk, dir. Christopher Nolan, reviewed by David Hartley

It has now been six months since the release of Dunkirk but its nomination for the Best Picture Oscar gives us a chance to return to it for a reconsideration, with a little pocket of distance as a cushion. At the time of release, the film was, for the most part, very warmly received – […]

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David Hartley

Lady Bird, dir. Greta Gerwig, reviewed by David Hartley

There is much that is familiar in Greta Gerwig’s Lady Bird. It is a coming-of-age tale about a high school teenager which hits many of the expected narrative beats; there are arguments with parents, deep-talk with teachers, intensely felt loves and devastating break-ups. There’s a school play, a prom dance, a boozy party. But Lady […]

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David Hartley

The Shape of Water, dir Guillermo Del Toro, reviewed by David Hartley

To be swept up in the current of Guillermo Del Toro’s The Shape of Water is to be bathed in the peculiar comfort afforded by the dark fairy-tale genre: there will be horrors, there will be monsters, but there will also be a magic which is on our side and will carry us safely back […]

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David Hartley

Phantom Thread, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, reviewed by David Hartley

I entered the world of Phantom Thread on very scant details and I would recommend the same approach for everyone else. Despite it’s subject matter, this is a film with no bluster or pretensions; it simply wants to pin you in place and tell you its story while it soaks you in its variations of […]

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The Manchester Review

The Final Year, dir. Greg Barker, reviewed by James Chonglong Gu

Aired at HOME MCR, the on-the-fly documentary The Final Year, directed by Greg Barker, provides us with an unprecedentedly intimate insider’s look at the inner workings of the Obama administration in its last months; the not-so-distant past that gave way to the new Trump-era. In 2008, when the exhilarating news broke that Barack Hussein Obama […]

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The Manchester Review

The Post, dir. Steven Spielberg, reviewed by David Hartley

With the current political pressures being exerted on news media in the US, cinematic comfort-blanket Steven Spielberg seems super-delighted to have emerged with such a timely film. In interviews, he’s pitched The Post as a rallying cry for the embattled news media of today; the posters shouting STREEP and HANKS like they are totemic warriors […]

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The Manchester Review

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri dir. Martin McDonagh, reviewed by David Hartley

With the proclamation of its title and the weathered defiance of Frances McDormand’s thousand-yard stare, Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is a film which demands attention. And it has garnered it, both from the critics and the Academy, as it edges ahead as the Oscars’ frontrunner, and deservedly so, perhaps. It’s by no means an […]

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The Manchester Review

The Florida Project dir. Sean Baker, reviewed by David Hartley

The latest in an emerging genre of a kind of post-Obama American social realism, The Florida Project lands us smack bang in the sticky heat of a Floridan summer in the run-down outskirts of the Magic Kingdom. Disneyland is a looming presence kept mostly off screen, but gaudily implied by the structures of our Orlando […]

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The Manchester Review

78/52, dir. Alexandre O’Phillipe, reviewed by David Hartley

There must be a palpable sense of trepidation when filmmakers and documentarians approach the topic of film itself, when the camera has to fetishize its mirror image in the form of a genius auteur or the upstart aesthetics of an eternally restless art form. Here, director Alexandre O’Phillipe reaches out like Indiana Jones for the […]

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The Manchester Review

Loving Vincent, dir. Dorota Kobiela & Hugh Welchman, reviewed by David Hartley

It is testament to the startling depth of film as an art medium that it has so brazenly brushed off all doom-laden interlopers that threatened to sink it – the coming of sound, the collapse of the studio system, the rise of TV, the internet, CGI, 3D, Netflix, and so on. In truth, film is […]

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The Manchester Review

Bladerunner 2049, dir. Denis Villeneuve, reviewed by David Hartley

I admit to a certain level of despair when reboot culture caught up with Blade Runner and this sequel was announced. I’d long held the original close as a piece of cinematic perfection; science fiction at its absolute zenith; a flawed gem, endlessly fascinating and, in its various iterations, strangely mercurial. But in the intervening […]

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The Manchester Review

Bitter Tears: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke

Bitter Tears: The Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, HOME, May 7-31. It is well known that the great West German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s work rate was prodigious. In a brief career between 1969 and 1982 he directed forty films and two television series, and wrote twenty-four stage plays and four radio plays. He not […]

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The Manchester Review

CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, reviewed by Laura Swift and Joel Swann

CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, February 4 – April 7, 2016 HOME’s ambitious season Crime: Hong Kong Style featured some twenty films over the course of two months, including films ranging from forgotten classics like The Swallow Thief, to international blockbusters such as Police Story, to several UK premieres. The season can be judged […]

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The Manchester Review

Always (Crashing) season, HOME, reviewed by Tristan Burke

Always (Crashing) season, HOME, March 18-31, 2016 The gap in the literary landscape left by J.G. Ballard’s death in 2009 is still very much with us. He was probably the single most important post-war English novelist, and he opened up the scope and style of the English novel far beyond the sentimental, bourgeois realism that […]

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The Manchester Review

CRIME: Hong Kong Style season, HOME, preview and interview with Andy Willis by Laura Swift and Joel Swann

CRIME: Hong Kong Style at HOME, February – April 2016 Chinese New Year celebrations in Hong Kong usually begin and end without making international headlines, but this year was different. On the evening of February 8th, the heavy-handed policing of street vendors in Mong Kok gave rise to the violent stand-offs that are now being […]

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The Manchester Review

The Revenant (2016), dir. Alejandro González Iñárritu, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater

When you went to see a film at The Cornerhouse you could feel secure in the fact that it had already received an important seal of approval. The Cornerhouse didn’t just show any film. It had to be considered a little bit special, and a little bit different, to make it onto the silver screen. […]

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The Manchester Review

The Hateful Eight (2016), dir. Quentin Tarantino, HOME, reviewed by Fran Slater

The Hateful Eight, dir. Quentin Tarantino, HOME, January 17 2016 Few films receive the levels of interest and attention that a new Quentin Tarantino release does. Over the last couple of months you’ll have seen the images everywhere. Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russell standing in the snow with their guns firmly grasped in their […]

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The Manchester Review

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2015), dir. Isao Takahata, The Cornerhouse, reviewed by Peter Wild

The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, Manchester Cornerhouse, March 14 2015 Last year, with The Wind Rises, we saw the last film by Hayao Miyazaki, the man responsible (if we can say a single man is responsible) for making the name of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese Disney, a global brand. This year, we see The […]

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The Manchester Review

The Two Faces of January (2014), dir. Hossein Amini, reviewed by Fran Slater

The Two Faces of January is the latest feature film from director Hossein Amini, whose previous works include 2011 hit Drive and 2012 blockbuster Snow White and the Huntsman. The success of both these films has led to increased levels of interest in his latest work. Set in the early 1960s, the film gets off […]

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The Manchester Review

Django Unchained (2012), dir. Quentin Tarantino, reviewed by Janet Rogerson

Two years before the American Civil War, Django (Jamie Foxx), a freed slave turned bounty hunter makes his way to Mississippi to free his wife Broomhilda (Kerry Washington), a slave at the Candieland plantation owned by Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio). We have come to expect a highly stylised, postmodern extravaganza whenever Tarantino directs, and we […]

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The Manchester Review

The Impossible (2012), dir. Juan Antonio Bayona, reviewed by Janet Rogerson

The Impossible tells the story of a middle-class British family holidaying in Thailand at Christmastime. Unluckily for them (and many others) their trip coincides with the 26th December 2004 tsunami. The build-up is short: they are a typical family, three boys, one a disgruntled adolescent, played impressively by Tom Holland, (who is destined to learn […]

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Ian Pople

Gangster Squad (2013), dir. Ruben Fleischer

by Ian Pople

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The Manchester Review

End of Watch (2012), dir. David Ayer, reviewed by Janet Rogerson

by Janet Rogerson

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Ian Pople

I, Anna (2012), dir. Barnaby Southcombe

by Ian Pople

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Ian Pople

Once upon a time in Anatolia (2011), dir. Nuri Bilge Ceylan

The Jury in Cannes were obviously feeling that films should be on the slow side last year.  Having given the Palme D’Or to Terence Malick’s ‘Tree of Life’, they gave the Grand Jury Prize to this very, very slow, exquisitely shot film from Turkey’s Nuri Bilge Ceylan.  Ceylan’s film lives almost entirely in real time.  […]

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