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Reviews

Ghost in the Shell | Review

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★★★

From the very top Rupert Sanders’ Ghost in the Shell nails its aesthetic. Taking stylistic cues from Blade Runner, Star Wars, Minority Report and company, the artistry on display here really is quite something. There is, however, a ‘but’ coming. For all of its fairground marvels – holographic advertisements, ultra-sleek black cars, neon lights – the world of 2017’s Ghost in the Shell, by contrast to the classic anime of 1995 and the manga serials before it, never quite grasps enough of a sense for the visceral and is thus never able to totally escape a feeling of artificiality.

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Reviews

Power Rangers | Review

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★★

The arrival of a Power Rangers reboot in the present era of superhero overload was so inevitable that the most surprising facet of its 2017 debut is the fact that it’s taken quite so long to morph from the ether. Those able to remember the 1990s Mighty Morphin TV series may have in the intervening years forgotten just how joyfully awful it was, a prime example as it is of the ability of campy nonsense to transcend its own awfulness and achieve a nostalgic status of adoration. There is something admittedly iconic about badass Teletubbies in onesies vocally karate kicking there way through innumerable bad guys.

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Reviews

The Lost City of Z | Review

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★★★★

Humanity has long endured a difficult relationship with nature. It’s a coexistence that has oft been tackled by literature and film alike: that desire for conquest and struggle for omnipotent domination, so perfectly epitomised by Caspar David Friedrich’s romanticist painting: The Wander Above a Sea of Fog, that has driven many an explorer to madness, their sanity a sacrifice to their ambition. From Livingstone to Scott, all have found the natural world to be a fearsome opponent.

Less well known than those Boys’ Own heroes is Lt. Col. Percival Harrison Fawcett, the subject of David Grann’s article, and later published biography, The Lost City of Z, now brought to the big screen by director James Grey. Between 1906 and 1925, Fawcett, portrayed in 2017 by Charlie Hunnam, undertook seven expeditions to South America, spending the most of those years in search of an ancient civilisation, proposed to have been long since lost within the jungles of Bolivia, akin to Hiram Bingham’s 1911 rediscovery of Machu Picchu in Peru.

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