REVIEW: The Souvenir [2019]

Very much in love. Love is a powerful drug. There’s the unadulterated high when things are going good and the debilitating anguish upon suffering withdrawal. We chase the former and fall into bad habits to avoid the latter—sacrificing everything we want to achieve for ourselves in order to sustain a union we cannot fathom being without. So even though Anthony (Tom Burke) is the only one shooting heroin, he’s not the only addict drawn by The Souvenir‘s writer/director Joanna Hogg. As he constantly asks Julie (Honor Swinton Byrne) for money…

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REVIEW: Exhibition [2014]

Stop worrying about me. After two films centering upon characters that need to escape their insular lifestyles in order to discover what it is they truly desire, Joanna Hogg‘s Exhibition conversely traps D (Viv Albertine) and H (Liam Gillick) within their claustrophobic yet comfortable home so they must confront their past and present before deciding on their future. She does this by using a 1969 house built by commercial architect James Melvin as her canvas, the actors as her paint. Its modern design provides three levels of segmentation: a communal…

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REVIEW: Archipelago [2011]

I’ll wait and see what I’m told to do. There’s no better name for what Joanna Hogg has created than Archipelago. Not only has she set her film upon a series of islands on which the central family vacations, but she’s also molded the members of that horde into those very same scattered mounds of land. This is to be their send-off for Edward (Tom Hiddleston) as he’s about to embark on an eleven-month stay in Africa as an aid worker: just him, his sister Cynthia (Lydia Leonard), their mom…

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REVIEW: Unrelated [2008]

Just don’t tell the olds. Yeah? Tired and defeated, Anna (Kathryn Worth) walks her way down dark roads to the rented Italian villa of her oldest friend Verena’s (Mary Roscoe) extended family. She was supposed to arrive with husband Alex, the vague excuse of him having to stay behind last minute as good a reason for her palpable malaise away from the larger group as the confrontational phone calls she’ll eventually field from him. There’s obviously trouble in the water where their marriage is concerned, but its severity is left…

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