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Buena Vista Social Club 1999
Incredible musicians and music. This documentary is an interesting watch, and it's gratifying that these individuals have been captured on film for posterity. There isn't a great deal of context, narrative or depth; it's not beautifully-shot or innovatively structured (in fact, its series of brief portraits are a little repetitive); it doesn't probe deeply into these people and their lives; Ry Cooder doesn't say a great deal about them. But that isn't really the purpose of the doc: it's a…
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Cold Souls 2009
An actor, Paul Giomatti, struggles under the weight of his own soul as he undertakes Chekov's introspective play, Uncle Vanya. In a bid to make life bearable, he risks a burgeoning and murky technology: soul extraction.
Poignant and funny, this was a sweet, sometimes sad, and well-executed comedy of errors, with good twists and turns, about the trial of living with ourselves, and the power of empathy and human connection.
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The Draughtsman's Contract 1982
A talented, arrogant, immoral and oversexed artist is drawn into a game of power, eroticism and murder when hired by a noblewoman to draw a perfect replica of her dismissive husband's beloved, picturesque, stately gardens. Nothing is what it seems, and the beautiful becomes the surreal and the dangerous.
Off-beat, bizarre, hard to follow, incredibly funny, utterly artistic, unnecessarily verbose, strangely unnerving, totally unexpected. I loved it completely.
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