CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Film round-up: January 19, 2023
MARIA DUARTE reviews Holy Spider, Alice, Darling, The Substitute, More Than Ever
CHARISMATIC: Juan Minujin in The Substitute
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Holy Spider (18)
Directed by Ali Abbasi
★★★
FROM the writer-director of the award-winning supernatural fantasy Border comes a gripping crime thriller about Iran’s most notorious serial killer, known as the Spider Killer, who hunted down street prostitutes.
Written and directed by Ali Abbasi, it is inspired by the real life tale of Saeed Hanaei, a father of three, who murdered 16 sex workers in the holy city of Mashhad in the early 2000s.
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