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In the three years since the premiere of House of Cards, television has changed dramatically. Rather than being forced to limit ourselves to one morsel of a story every week, we are increasingly given whole seasons of our favourite shows on a single day, and ‘binge-watching’ has become an acceptable pastime. Given the precedent set […]
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Lenny Abrahamson’s awards-tipped drama, Room, threatens to be nothing short of a two hour emotional bludgeoning of the audience at the hands of a story all the more nightmarish for its basis in fact. Brie Larson plays Joy Newsome, incarcerated for seven years along with her five year old son, Jack, (Jacob Tremblay), for whom […]
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I should probably preface this by admitting I haven’t seen many Netflix original series, bar the latest season of Arrested Development. It felt creaky, the Guy Ritchie-style mechanical plot betraying unwanted character changes and a diminished charm. It’s with that caveat fixed that I advance, and say that Bojack Horseman is perhaps the most enjoyable […]
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Like many people these days, I’m getting pretty sick of the seemingly unending deluge of superhero movies and TV shows being thrown at our faces. It seems you can’t go five minutes without running into another comic book adaptation a studio’s desperately trying to crowbar into a ‘cinematic universe’, and despite some being perfectly good […]
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A common complaint uttered by moviegoers is that film trailers nowadays spoil far too much of the film they are trying to advertise, removing any trace of surprise from the final feature. Just take the backlash over the second trailer for Batman vs Superman: Dawn of Justice which was released earlier this year. It revealed […]
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Fantasia. It’s the movie snob’s Disney film of choice, featuring some of the most imaginative and gorgeous animation the studio’s ever produced, set to beautiful classical music. It’s iconic, artistic and groundbreaking in demonstrating the scope of what animation could do and the potential of Disney as a film studio. For me? It taught me […]
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Great journalism isn’t about writing the stories you want to write, it’s about writing the stories that need to be written. At a time when students have been roundly criticised for creating a culture of campus censorship, journalists must, now more than ever, not be afraid to document the issues that matter and strike a […]
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If you grew up some time between the mid-1990s and the early 2000s, chances are you remember watching a particular type of Japanese anime (animated series) on TV. What we thought of as simply ‘Naruto’ or ‘Dragon Ball Z’ in fact came from a grand anime tradition known as ‘shōnen’ (meaning ‘few years’; i.e. anime […]
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The BBC certainly cannot be criticised for lacking ambition; producing a fresh interpretation of Tolstoy’s magnum opus is no easy task, particularly with scores of previous interpretations already available and a veritable masterpiece as its source. As with any adaptation, the transfer from page to screen meant the risk of losing the original’s charm – […]
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Good grief, you do not want to stand trial in Manitowoc County, Wisconsin, any time soon. For Steven Avery, unfortunately, this is becoming something of a bad habit. His murder trial is the subject of Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos’s 10-hour Netflix documentary series, Making a Murderer. If you pride yourself on keeping relatively abreast […]
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Steven Moffat had a tricky job to pull off as showrunner of Doctor Who, taking it off the hands of the man who spearheaded its revival and set the hugely successful tone for the modern incarnation of the show. But whilst it may have been easy to simply sit in Davies’ shadow and simply keep […]
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It could have been worse. When earlier this week Steven Moffat, longtime writer and showrunner since 2010, announced his decision to leave Doctor Who after the end of next series in Spring 2017 it marked the biggest change in personnel at the BBC since #TopGeargate last year. Moffat has managed to make his exit without […]
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‘I can’t help but ask the question, is it time people of colour recognise how much power and influence we have amassed, that we no longer need to ask to be invited anywhere.’ These words, recently spoken by Jada Pinkett-Smith, seemed to resonate with many in the face of another overwhelmingly white batch of Oscar […]
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One may say that what great films have in common is a tendency to go beyond the particular story they are telling and reach the universality of the ideas underneath it. The connection between the true, universal object of the directors’ speculation and the particular storyline they employ for narrating it is what makes their […]
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In 2008, the financial crisis caused depreciation in investment of over forty per cent[1]– unemployment and bankruptcy followed as viscous circle of financial panic consumed the world economy. In this context, The Big Short’s Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt) tells us that “for every one percent unemployment goes up, forty thousand people die”, a claim likely […]
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When watching The Revenant, you don’t feel like you’re just watching a film – it’s an experience. This tale of revenge, inspired by the life of Hugh Glass, a frontiersman in the South during the 1820s, is one of the most intense and gripping films to hit the big screen in a long time. But for […]
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For a long time, you’d have been forgiven for associating Alan Rickman with the typecast ‘bad guy’. His career certainly started that way, with his seductive portrayal of the mordant villain Valmont in Christopher Hampton’s 1986 stage production of Les Liaisons Dangereuses. His arrival on the film scene, too, saw him play a trio of […]
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Scrooge, Mr Bumble and Miss Havisham together at last – it was the best of times! For entertainment value, Dickensian has lived up to the hype, with the colourful array of characters providing comedy and drama, as one would rightly expect from such impressive source material and a stellar cast. Yet for the hardcore Dickens […]
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For every great film that makes it to a multiplex or student society near you, roughly 500 woefully conceived, poorly executed or just plain bad ones are released into the vast wilderness of the internet. Thanks to the power of Netflix, we can now witness these debacles like never before – after all, as much […]
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