![Review: Cicada [London Film Festival] – ‘Big Picture Film Club’](https://jonpaulroberts.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/y2nmnjk3yzgty2u0os00zgnilwixyzitogiwnjzmndmwytg4_filmstill-1.jpg?w=720)
"What happened to the web series? For one brief and shining moment, around the early 2010s, it was flourishing. It gave us creators like Issa Rae, Desiree Akhavan, Abbi Jacobson, and Ilana Glazer. It seemed ripe for the picking of talented individuals who had stuck their middle finger up at the perceived norms and taken their fate [...]
![Review: One Night in Miami [London Film Festival] – Big Picture Film Club](https://jonpaulroberts.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/6240.jpg?w=720)
"In a 2014 interview, the activist and writer Angela Y. Davis decried the emphasis on individualism in American history. “It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals,” she said, as a way to make sure that people today were able to recognise their “potential agency as part of [...]
![Review: Kajillionaire [London Film Festival 2020] – ‘Big Picture Film Club’](https://jonpaulroberts.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/1599861961_focusfeatures_kajillionaire_mirandajuly_evanrachelwood_debrawinger_ginarodriguez_richardjenkins_gallery-unit-3.jpg?w=720)
"One of the most quoted lines in all of literature is from the beginning of Anna Karenina: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." This has, for hundreds of years, surmised our feelings towards familial relationships. We view others with envy, the seemingly perfect family, while we resent our own uniquely [...]
'Does it refer to the huge news story? So gigantic it exploded onto the 24-hour news cycle in 2016, dominating the conversation for weeks. Or maybe it means the striking skinny blond newscasters who delivered that story on Fox News? The film’s title, Bombshell, isn’t the only thing that’s hard to pin down in this fictionalised retelling of the [...]
'When a parasite connects to its host, it’s trying to survive. As an organism it has adapted to this way of life, to rely on its host to endure, to feed, and to live. The host is noticeably weakened by the parasite, its resources now feed two beings and as such parasites are merciless.' You [...]
'Monsoon begins at a junction. The cars pass, slowly and orderly, before mopeds and vans swirl into the mix. Chaos fills the road with no markings, no sense of order, but yet there is no catastrophe only narrow misses and swerving bikes. The camera rises up, higher and higher, enlarging the scope of the madness, [...]
'‘The only thing my dad gave me that was worth anything was pain and you want to take that away from me,’ says Otis, a former child actor who is currently attending court-ordered rehab. He is in the process of therapy, something that is being recorded to prove to the courts he is recovering and Honey [...]
The Farewell Awkwafina ‘Based on a true story’ are words even the most casual of movie-goers will recognise. They’re almost in-built into the DNA of modern filmmaking, no matter how loosely they’re used. Lulu Wang’s second feature The Farewell, however, announces it’s ‘based on an actual lie’. You can read the full review here.
'In Pain and Glory, Pedro Almodóvar’s latest feature, there is a moment during a flashback scene that I distinctly recognised. A young boy sees a grown man naked for the first time. Eduardo (César Vincente) is a truly beautiful man, with delicate features and deep brown eyes, who has been helping the family fix up [...]
“Maybe that’s why we fuck things up – so that peace, when it comes, feels like enough.' - Animals, Emma Jane Unsworth Through my early twenties, I had a best friend. We were in a bigger group of seven but as part of an unspoken rule we were each other’s ‘emotional support’. Our group was [...]
Jon Paul Roberts 