The Wild Pear Tree (2018 Turkey)
Drama, Event, Genre
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Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Starring: Dogu Demirkol, Murat Cemcir, Bennu Yildirimlar
Genre: Drama
Duration: 188 mins
Sinan, an aspiring writer, returns home after university hoping to scrape together enough money to publish his first novel. He wanders the town encountering old flames and obstinate gatekeepers and finds his youthful ambition increasingly at odds with the deferred dreams of his gambling-addict father. As his own fantasies mingle with reality, Sinan grapples with the people and the place that have made him who he is. Episodic and unfolding in a series of Chekhovian vignettes, this is a portrait of the young artist told in reverse. Generally, the protagonists of such stories have escaped their home towns and are looking back on their experiences from the outside. Sinan, though, is coming back to where he started. Directed by Nuri Bilge Ceylan (Once Upon a Time in Anatolia; Winter Sleep – winner of the Palme d’Or 2014)
Amazing Grace
Drama, Event, Genre
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Directors: Â Alan Elliott, Sydney Pollack
Starring: Â Aretha Franklin, James Cleveland, Southern California Community Choir
Genre: Documentary, music
Duration: Â 129 mins
In January 1972, Aretha Franklin made her legendary album ‘Amazing Grace’ with the Southern California Community Choir and Reverend James Cleveland in the New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in Los Angeles. At the height of her fame, she made the decision to return to where she began, to the world of gospel music. Recorded in two days, this live album was to become the most successful gospel record of all time. On it, Franklin sings songs like ‘How I Got Over’, ‘Precious Memories’ and provides an 11-minute rendition of ‘Amazing Grace’. The result is a concert film that celebrates human dignity and the longing for freedom and justice and is able to transcend nostalgia and intervene in discussions about the state of the modern world. It also provides ample evidence of the enduring charisma of this soul icon who died in August 2018.
Birds of Passage
Drama, Event, Genre
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Directors: Cristina Gallego, Ciro Guerra
Starring: Carmiña MartÃnez, José Acosta, Natalia Reyes
Genre: Drama
Duration: 125 mins
During the marijuana bonanza, a violent decade that saw the origins of drug trafficking in Colombia, Rapayet and his indigenous family get involved in a war to control the business that ends up destroying their lives and their culture.
The advertised film Roma could not be shown due to distributor issues.
Sorry Angel (2018 France)
Drama, Event, Genre
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Director:  Christophe Honoré
Starring:  Vincent Lacoste, Pierre Deladonchamps, Denis Podalydès
Genre: Drama
Duration: Â 132 mins Rated R
Paris, 1993. Jacques is a semi-renowned writer and single father in his thirties trying to maintain his sense of romance and humour in spite of the turmoil in his life and the world. While on a work trip to Brittany, he meets Arthur, an aspiring filmmaker in his early twenties, who is experiencing a sexual awakening and eager to get out of his parochial life. Arthur becomes instantly smitten with the older man. From writer-director Christophe Honoré (Love Songs, Dans Paris) comes a mature and deeply emotional reflection on love and loss, youth and aging. In its inter-generational snapshot of cruising, courtship, and casual sex – Jacques’ forty-something neighbour Mathieu rounds out the triumvirate – Sorry Angel balances hope for the future with agony over the past in an unforgettable drama about finding the courage to love in the moment.
One Last Deal (2018 Finland)
Drama, Event, Genre
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Director:  Klaus Härö
Starring: Â Heikki Nousiainen, Pirjo Lonka, Amos Brotherus
Genre: Â Drama
Duration: Â 95 mins
An elderly art dealer Olavi is about to retire. A man who has always put business and art before everything, even his family, cannot imagine life without work. At an auction, an old painting catches his attention. Olavi suspects it is worth much more than its starting price, which is low because its authenticity hasn’t been confirmed. Olavi’s instincts kick in. He decides to make one last deal in order to earn some proper pension money. At the same time, Olavi’s daughter Lea, whom he hasn’t seen for years, asks him to help her with his teenage grandson Otto. Together with Otto, Olavi starts to investigate the background of the painting…
High Life (2018 France)
Event, Genre, Sci-fi
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Director: Claire Denis
Starring:  Robert Pattinson, Juliette Binoche, André Benjamin
Genre: Â Sci-fi, adventure
Duration: 110 mins Rated R
Claire Denis reorients the sci-fi genre around bodies, babies and black holes in her masterfully mystifying event-horizon nightmare. Her English-language début doesn’t give a damn about physics and not just in the way that bodies tumble wrongly out of airlocks and nobody seems to spend a moment of their day engaged in cosmic problem-solving. In the science fiction of Denis’ forbiddingly austere and audacious imagining, the science is biology: Out here, we are not made of stars but of blood, hair, spit and semen.
A group of death-row inmates, imprisoned for crimes only ever vaguely outlined, have been offered commutation and a chance at redemption if they will man this mission to investigate the “Penrose Process†– a real-world theory propounded by physicist Roger Penrose whereby energy might be extracted from a region close to a black hole…
Storm Boy (2019 Australia)
Drama, Event, Genre
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Director: Â Shawn Seet
Starring: Â Jai Courtney, Geoffrey Rush, David Gulpilil
Genre: Drama
Duration: 120 mins
This new version of the Colin Thiele’s 1964 book about the relationship between a pelican and the son of a beach-dwelling hermit not only compares favourably with the original, it often outdoes it, offering more story and substance. The new film stages things a little more dramatically. It casts the story as a flashback told by an ageing corporate exec Mike (Geoffrey Rush) to his grand- daughter Madeline. She, like many in the community is angry that his company, which she is soon to be part of, wants to develop the beach where Mike raised three pelicans as a child with his reclusive fisherman dad and indigenous friend Fingerbone Bill. Though less subtle in its contemplation of environmental devastation, coping with loss and change and letting go of the ones you love, this four-decades-later remake still flaps its way into viewers’ hearts like its intrepid pelican hero.
Happy as Lazzaro (2018 Italy)
Drama, Event, Genre, Mystery
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Director: Â Alice Rohrwacher
Starring: Â Alba Rohrwacher, David Bennent, Nicoletta Braschi
Genre: Â Drama, mystery
Duration: Â 130 mins
Beloved by audiences and critics at Cannes (where it was awarded the Best Screenplay prize), Alice Rohrwacher’s new film is a beguiling allegory of love, loss and compassion exploring the troubled soul of Italy. Its summer at Inviolata, an isolated rural estate, where an extended family of tobacco farmers toil under the rule of a domineering marchesa and where the handsome and hard-working Lazzaro, a young man imbued with a saint-like innocence, is alternately adored and taken advantage of. When the marchesa’s self-absorbed son, Tancredi first visits the fields, he senses an opportunity and embroils Lazzaro in an audacious plan to swindle his mother.  
Channelling the spirit of Pasolini, Rohrwacher’s fascinating tale casts a wondrous spell, and confirms her status as one of the most inventive and compelling voices in contemporary Italian cinema.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019 USA)
Comedy, Drama, Event, Genre
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Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Luke Perry, Margot Robbie, Leonardo DiCaprio
Genre: Drama, comedy
Duration: 120 mins Rated R
Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film is a sprawling tale of counterculture California and the final days of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Set in 1969’s LA, the two lead characters are Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), former star of a Western TV series and his longtime stunt double Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Both are struggling to make it in a Hollywood they no longer recognize, but Rick has a very famous next-door neighbour, Sharon Tate.
Tarantino has said “I’m very excited to tell this story of an LA and a Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore.” Cinematographer Robert Richardson added, “I think the tone of it is – it’s difficult to describe because it’s very fresh, but it oscillates between humorous, serious, spooky; it’s playful. It’s not easily describable.”
Never Look Away (2018 Germany)
Drama, Event, Genre
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Director: Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck
Starring: Â Tom Schilling, Sebastian Koch, Paula Beer
Genre: Drama
Duration: 189 mins Rated R
Inspired by the early life and career of renowned contemporary artist Gerhard Richter, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck (The Lives of Others) once again looks into the dark corners of his country’s recent history. Opening with the notorious 1937 Degenerate Art exhibition organized by the Nazis, the film tells the parallel stories of a doctor involved in “cleansing” allegedly racially inferior people and of a young boy who is fascinated by art. That child later comes of age amid the chaos of postwar German partition: as a man living in East Germany, Kurt has a job creating propaganda billboards while pining to be an artist. Meanwhile, the doctor, Seeband, is captured by the Soviets and interrogated for his role in the Nazi eugenics program. The intertwined fates of these two men forms the dramatic focus of this reflection on the two sides of the German Democratic Republic’s political and ideological past.