Khalid Ali: Ageing (dis)gracefully from Camden pavements to Swiss resorts

Review of “The lady in the van” directed by Nicholas Hytner, UK release 13th November 2015, and “Youth” directed by Paolo Sorrentino, UK release January 2016 “The lady in the van” and “Youth” that recently premièred at the London Film Festival (LFF) in October 2015 are two great films about “senior citizens” in two completely […]

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Patients’, doctors’ and nurses’ stories at the London Film Festival (7-18 October 2015)

‘The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly’ Patients’, doctors’ and nurses’ stories at the London Film Festival (7-18 October 2015) October is the time of the year when the London Film Festival (LFF) http://www.bfi.org.uk/lff brings the best of British and World cinema to film lovers in London. Screening 238 fiction and documentary feature films, the […]

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Film Review: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl

“Me and Earl and the Dying Girl”, USA 2015 Directed by Alfonso Gomez-Rejon In UK cinemas now American cinema has always been fascinated by stories of cancer in young people; Love story, USA 1970, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Story_(1970_film), 50/50 (USA, 2011) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50/50_(2011_film), and more recently “The fault in our stars, USA 2014” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fault_in_Our_Stars_(film). The first feature film from […]

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Film Review: Inside Out

This year’s summer release by Pixar Animation Studios, Inside Out, follows the inner workings of the mind of Riley, an 11-year-old girl from Minnesota, as her life is suddenly turned upside down when her family moves to San Francisco. This film has already received great acclaim at Cannes Film Festival 2015 for its heartfelt relatable […]

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Film Review: Mediterranea

  Lambert Wilson, actor and musician, Master of Ceremonies of Cannes Film Festival 2014, said “The world is written in an incomprehensible language, but cinema translates it for us universally. Without its guiding light, each person would remain in isolated darkness”. Exactly a year later in May 2015, an Italian film “Mediterranea” directed by Jonas […]

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Film Review: Alive Inside

It is because we live in a society where we tend to commit vulnerable members such as people with dementia to care institutions that we need documentaries like “Alive inside”. This very moving film, winner of the “Audience Award” at the Sundance Film Festival, 2014, follows a New York based social worker Dan Cohen as […]

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Film Review: Wild Tales

What separates us from living like animals? And what calamity or force does it take to unleash our primal instincts?   “Wild Tales” is a compendium of satirical short stories about the pain and pressure points of modern 21st Century life and specifically what happens to the Latin spirit under duress. What delirious lengths do […]

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Film Review: Still Alice

Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a good-looking fifty-year-old successful professor of linguistics; her loving husband (Alec Baldwin) is a brilliant research physician, she has three beautiful children, a brownstone in the Upper West side and a house at the Hamptons. This is the perfect stage for an impending disaster; in fact after some episodes of […]

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