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Anatomy of a Fall
(2023)
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Merve Emre
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Anatomy of a Fall is not truly a story about marriage, good, bad, whatever. It is a story about how cinema can reconcile these estranged genres of prose. More prosaically, it is about how a mother needs her son, and how a son needs his mother...
Posted May 31, 2024
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About Dry Grasses
(2023)
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James Quandt
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In many ways a compendium of Ceylan's cinema, About Dry Grasses repeats themes, settings, and images from as far back as his first feature, The Small Town.
Posted Mar 22, 2024
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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One
(2023)
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A.S. Hamrah
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A fading echo of Hawksian professionalism and humanism...
Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Ferrari
(2023)
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A.S. Hamrah
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In Ferrari, Mann’s fixation on death, on the cemetery and the tomb, positions this melodrama as a consecration and summation of his life’s work.
Posted Mar 08, 2024
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Poor Things
(2023)
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Christine Smallwood
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Emma Stone’s performance is dazzling, but all the actors -- chief among them Mark Ruffalo, who plays a ridiculous Lothario who, in Bella, finds more than he can handle -- appear to be having the time of their lives.
Posted Dec 21, 2023
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Oppenheimer
(2023)
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Martin Filler
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I found Nolan’s pull-out-all-the-stops IMAX extravaganza an exhilarating reintroduction to cinema, stunningly realized by the sweeping cinematography of the Dutch-Swedish Hoyte van Hoytema.
Posted Jul 27, 2023
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The Color Purple
(1985)
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Darryl Pinckney
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Spielberg's strategy was to broaden Walker's cunning simplifications, and in blowing up her plot, Spielberg not only makes its flaws more visible, he also uncovers, beneath the feminist rhetoric, the melodrama at its heart.
Posted May 31, 2023
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The Swimmers
(2022)
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Yasmine El Rashidi
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The effect is emotionally gripping (the film does provoke tears), but the inner lives and anguish, the ongoing sorrow at losing a homeland, are somehow overlooked.
Posted May 12, 2023
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Showgirls of Pakistan
(2020)
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Alizeh Kohari
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Showgirls isn’t interested in suffering, but is genuinely curious about what it takes to survive on the margins.
Posted Apr 20, 2023
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Joyland
(2022)
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Alizeh Kohari
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Joyland deploys a different sort of male gaze, if I can call it that, one laced with envy and curiosity rather than possession -- painfully aware that the men anointed to run the world are themselves utterly miserable.
Posted Apr 14, 2023
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Aftersun
(2022)
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Daniel Drake
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The role calls for the sensitivity of the budding artist, the impishness of childhood, the yearning of adolescence, security and sudden insecurity, the unspoken intimacy of parent and child. Corio is marvelous.
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Tár
(2022)
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Zadie Smith
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Blanchett’s characterization of this Lydia Tár proves so thorough, so multifaceted in its dimensions, so believable, that it defies even the film’s most programmatic intentions.
Posted Dec 29, 2022
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White Noise
(2022)
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Andrew Martin
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The contradictory jumble of styles undermines any possibility of tonal consistency, the very thing that keeps what DeLillo called the novel’s “wobbly” plotting from tipping into incoherence.
Posted Dec 21, 2022
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A Couple
(2022)
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Jennifer Wilson
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There is something awkward about how the film obscures the particulars of sexism as Sophia experienced them to make her life more legible within a contemporary feminist discourse.
Posted Dec 03, 2022
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Catherine Called Birdy
(2022)
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Anahid Nersessian
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The world [Dunham] creates is warm, welcoming, and full of low-drama pleasures like rolling around in the mud, eating cake, dancing, lying on a riverbank, and making out.
Posted Oct 20, 2022
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Lamb
(2021)
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Leslie Jamison
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Jóhannsson asks us to recognize the violence embedded in loving a creature that is not yours to love.
Posted Oct 12, 2022
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Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road
(2021)
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Verlyn Klinkenborg
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Long Promised Road feels both vapid and exploitative. And worse, it has almost nothing of value to tell us about the actual music Wilson created.
Posted Oct 01, 2022
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Memoria
(2021)
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Phoebe Chen
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"What was that sound?” is another way of asking: What do I know about the material world and how it behaves? Memoria’s sound design nudges prosaic scraps of ambient noise into the spotlight.
Posted Aug 19, 2022
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Lost Illusions
(2021)
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Victoria Baena
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Filmed on location with a star-studded cast (several of whom have acted in other Balzac adaptations), the film takes evident delight in its portrait of what Walter Benjamin called the “capital of the nineteenth century.”
Posted Jul 29, 2022
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Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn
(2021)
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J. Hoberman
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Bad Luck Banging, or Loony Porn, the Romanian director Radu Jude’s exuberantly rude and bawdy new film, is a movie about us. Or rather, it’s a comedy about our world.
Posted Mar 14, 2022
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Losing Ground
(1982)
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Yasmina Price
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Losing Ground critically pushed back against facile depictions and monolithic reductions of black people in the mainstream cinematic canon.
Posted Mar 01, 2022
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Parallel Mothers
(2021)
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Colm Toibin
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What might appear to be Almodóvar’s most political film gently nudges the characters back toward private life, just as some version of harmony or resolution is restored to their broken world.
Posted Mar 01, 2022
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The Tragedy of Macbeth
(2021)
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James Shapiro
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Coen shows far greater interest in Shakespeare's language than his cinematic predecessors, and his accomplished cast speak Shakespeare's verse comfortably and naturally.
Posted Jan 06, 2022
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Undine
(2020)
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J. Hoberman
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The German director Christian Petzold is a maestro of modern (or modernized) myths.
Posted Jul 02, 2021
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Martin Eden
(2019)
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J. Hoberman
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A movie that arrives like a bolt out of the blue, bursting with ideas, not unlike its hero.
Posted Oct 16, 2020
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Attack of the Crab Monsters
(1957)
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J. Hoberman
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Ripe... a guilty pleasure of mine...
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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The Lovely Month of May
(1963)
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J. Hoberman
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...a pioneering work of free-associational "direct cinema" by Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme...
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Long Day's Journey Into Night
(2018)
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J. Hoberman
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...an atmospheric, tropical film noir...
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Venom and Eternity
(1950)
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J. Hoberman
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Consider it a recalcitrant chunk of twentieth-century cultural history.
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Jazz on a Summer's Day
(1959)
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J. Hoberman
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Jackson provides a suitably formidable closer with "The Lord's Prayer," but the movie peaks early with O'Day's stoned version of "Sweet Georgia Brown" and rapid-fire scatting on "Tea for Two."
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Viridiana
(1961)
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J. Hoberman
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Made in Franco's Spain, Luis Buñuel's blasphemous comedy Viridiana (1961) poked a finger in the dictator's eye...
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Pauline at the Beach
(1983)
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J. Hoberman
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French bedroom farce stripped down to its essentials.
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Kuroneko
(1968)
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J. Hoberman
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The movie's implacable sense of poetic justice is only equaled by its graphic smarts.
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Tokyo Olympiad
(1965)
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J. Hoberman
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Ichikawa's movie is not only exciting but excited in documenting...
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Beanpole
(2019)
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J. Hoberman
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Balagov's beautifully acted second feature...
Posted Aug 14, 2020
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Cane River
(1982)
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Tiana Reid
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Cane River offers a prescient perspective on how history lingers, and how blackness is not simply diverse in a neoliberal multiculturalist sense, but also contradictory and in conflict politically...
Posted Jun 25, 2020
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Ghosts of Sugar Land
(2019)
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Yasmin Adele Majeed
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Ghosts of Sugar Land is a look at the jump from boyhood to adulthood-that inevitable journey of loss.
Posted Jun 22, 2020
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The Edge of Democracy
(2019)
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Larry Rohter
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The Edge of Democracy is visually powerful and also benefits from behind-the-scenes access to Lula, Dilma, and their advisers that would be the envy of any filmmaker or journalist.
Posted May 29, 2020
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The Wild Goose Lake
(2019)
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Jiwei Xiao
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The Wild Goose Lake is not by any means the first Chinese film to be set in Wuhan, but it's rare to hear an entire cast speak the Wuhan dialect and see the city's real locations-especially its lake and "urban villages"-feature in a high-profile film.
Posted Mar 19, 2020
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Burning Cane
(2019)
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Casey Gerald
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If every great story ends by starting a new story, then Phillip Youmans has succeeded on two levels with Burning Cane: we want to know what Helen has done. Even more, we want to know what Mr. Youmans will do next.
Posted Mar 12, 2020
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Vitalina Varela
(2019)
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Will Noah
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Costa's earlier films have shown how his country's history has left Cabo Verdeans wounded in ways that even he still struggles to understand. Vitalina Varela emphasizes that, even among the people connected by this collective experience...
Posted Mar 06, 2020
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The Clock
(2010)
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Zadie Smith
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The Clock is so monumental in intention and design that even the simplest things you can say about it need qualification.
Posted Feb 12, 2020
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For Sama
(2019)
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Robert F. Worth
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A remarkable documentary and important contribution to a collective portrait of the Syrian tragedy...
Posted Feb 07, 2020
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The Cave
(2019)
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Robert F. Worth
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...raw and painful to watch, contain scenes of arresting intimacy...
Posted Feb 07, 2020
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Three Christs
(2017)
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Rick Moody
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When Avnet's film takes the same approach, and just lets them talk, it is painful, noble, and beautiful, not least because of the great performances of the three schizophrenic characters.
Posted Jan 16, 2020
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Transit
(2018)
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J. Hoberman
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Inhabiting a realm between the past and present, Europe and America, and also cinema and literature, [Petzold's characters] are, in Hannah Arendt's phrase, "living ghosts among the ruins of our times."
Posted Dec 20, 2019
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Atlantics
(2019)
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Tiana Reid
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Diop's imaginative feature exemplifies a labor politics fiercely concerned with gender and sexuality.
Posted Dec 18, 2019
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No Man's Land
(2017)
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Adam Hochschild
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Byars's camera work gives you a sense of these determined true believers stalking about in pistol belts and leather vests in their snowbound citadel.
Posted Dec 06, 2019
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Synonymes
(2018)
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J. Hoberman
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...at once an ambivalent love letter to Paris and a startling act of cinematic aggression. The camera moves are brusque.
Posted Nov 02, 2019
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The Great Hack
(2019)
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Tamsin Shaw
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The Great Hack is an important film, one that people need to see, but its account of the Cambridge Analytica operation scarcely touches the shady world of the billionaire oligarchs who are the real financial and political forces behind the scenes.
Posted Aug 30, 2019
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