Remember the TV programme The Littlest Hobo? The show that had a friendly hobo mutt that would roam from town to town and befriend pitiful social outcasts before leaving them bereft and lonely? Well, Wendy and Lucy takes the hobo dog theme to the extreme. Here we don’t have a friendly itinerant canine providing solace to the young and elderly. Here we have...

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If you listened to my wife, she’d have you believe that the Portuguese invented everything in the world – dried salt cod, lobotomies, time travel and fresh air to name just a few. But with A Talking Picture they sure as fuck didn’t invent good cinema. Manoel de Oliveira is the oldest filmmaker working in the world today. Living off of nothing but...

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The Lovely Bones sees Peter Jackson returning to Heavenly Creatures territory. His latest film deals with adolescence and murder, and once again it allows his imagination to cut loose. But while Heavenly Creatures featured a fantasy world that was the creation of the characters, The Lovely Bones spends a lot of time in purgatory and heaven. I wish I could say that the...

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I admire anyone who attempts to do something different with the horror genre. Say what you will about The Blair Witch Project, I think it’s an excellent film. With a very limited budget, they made a creepy campfire yarn. Then you have The Shining, which is almost an arthouse flick. Anything that gets away from the cheap shocks and familiar beats that hobble...

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With apartheid over, whitey in South Africa must be awfully pissed off. What to do now that the black population supposedly has equality? Thankfully, in District 9, a bunch of aliens arrive for the general populace to focus their hate and fear on. Who needs blacks when you have prawns? The use of the term prawn for the aliens is a deliberately dehumanising...

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