review
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Anyone who grew up in the early days of social media may remember the aura of fear and mystique that had many parents convinced the internet was a den of predators hiding behind each and every screen. We were told to never speak to online strangers, never give out our real names,…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan In the age of complete cultural penetration for superhero properties, where audiences are familiar with and eager for more of the most bizarre corners of these comic-book universes, one question seems to gnaw at the Distinguished Competition – how can we sell Superman? Nearly a hundred years on from his inception, how…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning has so much going on that it feels daunting to figure out where to start, as even the beginning if the film is like a headlong dive into the deep end of a pool that’s on fire. Once we decide where to begin, we face the…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan In the opening scene of Wes Anderson’s new film The Phoenician Scheme, a man is killed in a manner that is both uncharacteristically brutal and completely in keeping with the director’s sensibilities – Benicio Del Toro turns and looks at the unsuspecting victim, there is a beat of confused calm, and then…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan What, to you, is more important when it comes to a story? The actual events, or the way it is told? Some stories sound much more interesting on paper than they are in practice, for example, an adaptation that doesn’t match your imagined picture of the source material. Or the opposite can…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan I have a complicated relationship with the music biopic. On the one hand, I’m well aware of their limitations and foibles, and exceedingly wary of the deluge of low-quality rush jobs that have proliferated in recent years. Dewey Cox was very much the last word on the genre years before it truly…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Monday – Liar Liar, Rear Window and Airplane! While Jim Carrey has often proved perfectly capable of giving grounded, dialled-back performances when the film called for it, this is an interesting beast – a perfectly ordinary, straightforwardly sentimental story that Carrey plays to the absolute maximum of his comic buffoonery. It’s as…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan Who else here saw Challengers earlier this year and had their minds blown? The trio of stunning performances, the perfectly paced non-linear story, the pounding electronic score, precise camera and rhythmic editing – it’s one of the year’s very best, yet it seems to have fallen by the wayside in the awards…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan For the first third or so of Sean Baker’s film Anora, we are invited to live vicariously in a world free of worries or consequences, the playground of the young, the beautiful, and the obscenely rich. Anora (Mikey Madison) has hit the jackpot by catching the eye of Ivan ‘Vanya’ Zacharov (Mark…
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by Oscar O’Sullivan WARNING – this review will get into some major spoilers for Gladiator II. I normally prefer not to do this with newly-released films, but a lot of what I want to dig into would be impossible to discuss without getting into the final act. Personally speaking, I don’t think the film offers…
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