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Talk to Me

Talk to Me

★★★★

Some may roll their eyes to the back of their head like Reagan in The Exorcist at Australian YouTubers RackRacka (aka Danny and Michael Philippou) making the leap to feature filmmaking, but their daring modern horror employs its central concept of teenagers using demonic possession to get high as a thrilling and emotionally engaging exploration of grief, peer pressure and teen life in the digital age.

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You Hurt My Feelings

You Hurt My Feelings

★★★★

Writing can be a lonely pursuit, and authors must often rely on those closest to them for support and feedback as they attempt to navigate the process of constructing a story. So it goes for Beth (Julia Louie-Dreyfus), a novelist who has just finished her second book – a follow-up to her reasonably successful memoir. She has what she believes to be a good marriage therapist husband Don (Tobias Menzies), until she overhears him criticising her new novel to her…

Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer

★★★★★

There’s something very moving about watching a film and being able to see dust motes float in the air. Or the reddened, mottled skin on the back of an actor’s neck. Or the abrasive textures of wood and fabric. Or drops of water causing minute ripples once they descend into a pond – a visual motif that receives its fiery analog at the slow burn climax of this grandiose new film from Christopher Nolan.

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The writer, critic, cultural historian, hiking enthusiast and all-round intrepid man of letters Mark Cousins does himself a disservice by minimising his own redoubtable presence from his new film, My Name is Alfred Hitchcock.

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Barbie

Barbie

★★★★½

It’s a great shame that throughout the Barbie press cycle, seemingly no one has asked Greta Gerwig about Marcel Proust. The multihyphenate is an avowed fan – there’s a throwaway joke about his (literally and figuratively) heavy work in Frances Ha, and in LWLies’ 2018 interview with her, she refers to the quasi-Proustian memory experience of making the semi-autobiographical Lady Bird.

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Medusa

Medusa

★★★

"Hell is a teenage girl” is a statement that the group of devout young Christian women in Anita Rocha da Silveira’s highly stylised second feature would no doubt take offence at, while at the same time, would ironically go to extreme lengths to corroborate. Singing the Lord’s praises by day at a neon-soaked, flashy church, and turning into a vigilante gang roaming the streets by night, this elite group of young women known in their community as The Treasures is…

It’s an instant extra star when Oasis mastermind Noel Gallagher turns up in a documentary as a talking head. He’s not the focus here, in Anton Corbijn’s film charting the salad days of rock album artwork maestros, Hipgnosis (aka Aubrey “Po” Powell and Storm Thorgerson). Yet his are by far the most memorable segments, most notable being one where he lambasts the cover artwork for his own multi-platinum-selling (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? as being some of the shittest ever made, and them lambasts himself for signing off on it.

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Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) has a difficult choice to make. Not over whether to accept what might be his toughest and most perilous mission yet, but rather – in a surprising high-stakes twist on the Distracted Boyfriend meme – between two equally charming and dangerous brunettes, whose fates become tragically intertwined after a cyber weapon with deeply worrying implications for humanity surfaces. Some dudes just can’t catch a break.

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