jessica chastain

Memory

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Sylvia and Saul in profile

There are issues in Memory, and memory itself has something to do with what’s going on. But it’s the small things rather than the big ones that give the film its grip and punch. The many social-realist auteurs pushing our faces into the raw meat of life could learn a lot from Michel Franco’s remarkable film. It starts out like many a kitchen sinker – at an AA meeting where Sylvia, its hero, is just one of many unfortunates trying to put life back together after getting too friendly with the bottle. Then it follows her to her workplace. A day centre for adults with learning difficulties, a job that seems to be … Read more

The Forgiven

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The boy's father, David, host Richard and the police

Lush and lovely and slightly empty, The Forgiven is the clockwork toy that fails to march. And it all looks so promising to start with. The opening moments alone really get the hopes up – that saturated colour red of the scrolling credits seems to be offering a vast 1960s-style epic à la Lawrence of Arabia, the North African settings suggest maybe Bertolucci’s The Sheltering Sky and the presence of Ralph Fiennes hints at another The English Patient maybe. Fiennes and Jessica Chastain play the bickering married couple who knock down and kill a young Moroccan fossil seller one night while en route to a party out at some huge swish villa in … Read more

Zero Dark Thirty

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Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty

A movie for every day of the year – a good one 27 December Benazir Bhutto assassinated, 2007 On this day in 2007, Benazir Bhutto, leader of the Pakistan People’s Party and a former Prime Minister of Pakistan, died in a bomb attack at a political rally in Rawalpindi. She was campaigning in the upcoming general election. A glamorous figure in Pakistani politics, she was the daughter of former Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and had been elected Prime Minister at the age of 35, in 1989, the first woman to lead a Muslim country. Though because of the presidential system, Bhutto was constantly in a struggle for executive power with President Ghulam … Read more