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Image Description: Kathryn Bigelow 2019 saw a historic number of women working in the film industry. It was also another year in which women were absent from the nominees for Best Director at both the Golden Globes and the Oscars, with films such as Greta Gerwig’s Little Women and Lulu Wang’s The Farewell omitted. The upcoming 78thAnnual […]
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Image description: Legs crossed on a living room table with a background of a TV with Netflix on it, a guitar on the side, and plants around the room. Debate about who makes art and who features in it is a constant conversation in my life. It is hard to explain why seeing someone like […]
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Image description: A red bricked barn surrounded by trees. There is a scene in Lee Isaac Chung’s film Minari (2020) that features a brief conversation between a father and a son outside of a chicken factory. Both speaking in Korean: pointing to a chimney belching black smoke, the son asks, ‘What’s that?’, and the father […]
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Image description: Michelle Pfeiffer portraying Countess Ellen Olenska in the film Age of Innocence. Martin Scorsese is, without doubt, my favourite film director. Watching GoodFellas in my early teenage years, I was captivated, while somewhat conflicted, by the anti-hero Henry Hill’s life of excess. The film begins with Henry as a teenager himself. Soon, he […]
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Image description: An open book and cup of tea resting on some wood in front of a lake As we enter further into second lockdown, and the evenings are getting darker and longer, no doubt many of us are finding things rather tedious. If living through these ‘unique times’ isn’t quite entertaining enough for you, […]
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Image Description: Glasses and a magnifying glass rest on top of a book. Following the recent tradition of period dramas such as Autumn de Wilde’s Emma or Armando Iannucci’s David Copperfield, Enola Holmes (Netflix) doesn’t take itself too seriously and really plays into the humour and the quirkiness of its characters. The film stars Millie […]
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Image description: Series of moon phases, waning, on black background This time 12 years ago, I was 12 myself, and about to start my first year at secondary school. Unsure of what to expect, I scoured teen magazines – Bliss, Mizz, Sugar, the Irish publication Kiss – in search of tips to help me navigate […]
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Image Description: characters Lars and Sigrit on stage in front of the Icelandic flag Like millions of other Eurovision enthusiasts, I felt my heart sink on March 18th – the day we heard that this year’s contest would no longer be going ahead. I hung my head as I cancelled my viewing party plans and […]
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Image Description: Inside Divinity Schools, Oxford Many of us applied to Oxford with a secret ambition to live our best lives, Brideshead Revisited style. The mental image of spending days punting down the Isis, poring over slab-like books in quirky little pubs and dining in vast, Harry Potter-esque halls seemed all too tempting, thanks to […]
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Image description: a shot from ‘First Thing’ music video A discussion with Flora Faulk, an Art History student at St. Peters, on her recent production of the music video for fellow student, Gigi William’s debut EP and single ‘First Thing’. Flora explains how she got into film-making and ways to get involved from a student […]
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Image description: The view from a plane window I had already seen the film upon its theatrical release, yet here I was watching it again on a screen one-hundredth of the size. Dunkirk nonetheless had me transfixed. Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece almost made me forget the uncomfortable economy seat I was in and the ever-present buzz […]
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Image description: Family watching TV together in the 1950s Are you still watching? Or are you catatonic, quilt-smothered and crisp-covered, one foot dangling over the end of the bed in refuge from the furnace-like heat of your duvet, and one eye bleakly registering the lockdown breadmaking psychodrama on your mum’s cat’s Instagram? This is the […]
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Image Description: Illustrations of scenes from each film This is the year of Parasite, but it is also the year in which Donald Trump declared that a film like Gone With The Wind should have won Best Picture instead. No, Gone With The Wind shouldn’t win Best Picture in 2020, in fact, it shouldn’t have […]
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Image Description: A illustration of a scene from Mulan Oh, glorious CGI! We are a slave to your technicolour dreamscapes, your larger-than-life monsters. It seems remarkable to me to re-watch the first Harry Potter film and realise that I am expected to be gripped by terror, watching that magnificent blue troll before me. It looks, […]
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Image Description: The Hollywood sign “Terrible things were happening all around us. Right next to me a huge reptile was gnawing on a woman’s neck, the carpet was a blood-soaked sponge – impossible to walk on it, no footing at all. ‘Order some golf shoes,’ I whispered. ‘Otherwise, we’ll never get out of this place […]
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Image Description: Poppy flowers in a field When it comes to war films, there are, broadly, two schools of thought for the modern Hollywood studio executive and producer, both of which result in the production of dull and deeply unsatisfying pictures. First of all, and perhaps the most irritating, (although the less troubling) is the […]
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Image description: A collection of matte paintings from a contest The technique known as matte painting is one of the earliest visual effects techniques to be used in filmmaking. Today, in an age dominated by computer renderings of worlds beyond our own, it is often nice to look back on the people who laid the […]
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Love Actually is my favourite Christmas film. When Santa’s sack of vac scheme deadlines pushes me to the edge, I like to kick back and relax to some wholesome content. This is my escapism of choice. Love Actually is not only touching and profound but offers a vision of a better Britain. Fans of ‘multikulti’ […]
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Tom Hooper’s cinematic production of Cats has been a complete failure in the eyes of critics, being so scathingly criticised that there has been talk of a remake, an attempt at redeeming at least an ounce of dignity for T.S. Eliot’s book of poems. While I recognise and agree with many points of criticism, I cannot […]
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