Tag Archives: Reviews

Raw | Review

★★★★

Raw has in it the most terrifying scene you will see in 2017. A disturbing vignette in which shots disorientate, the soundtrack sickens and all captured in the camera’s frame represent a threat. Three words can describe the sequence and each one will indeed send a chill to the very root of your spine; be warned, they may even put you off from daring to enter your local screening at all: student house party. The nightmare is real and were these deafening drunken exploits not horrifying enough, the plot cascading around them concerns cannibalism. This is certainly an experience offering much to get your teeth into. Ahem.

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Power Rangers | Review

★★

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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The Lost City of Z | Review

★★★★

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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