Category: Imaginary Animals: No
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They Shall Not Grow Old. Dir. Peter Jackson. Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.. 2018.
Not often is a film’s purpose so clearly stated in its title, yet Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old1(TSNGO) is a documentary with meticulous dedication to preserving the stories of those who fought in World War One. Framed by black and white footage of pre-war conscription and the return home from combat, the documentary’s centre is…
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Enemy. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. E1 Films. 2013.
Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy follows Adam, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a history professor, disillusioned with life and suffering from a feeling of social malaise, and Anthony, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, a wannabe actor who regularly cheats on his pregnant wife. Adam sees Anthony as an extra in a movie and becomes obsessed with him. Anthony is eventually killed…
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Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. Dir. David Yates. Warner Bros. Pictures. 2016.
Courage, nerve, chivalry, the makings of a true her- oh? This story is about a Hufflepuff? Newt Scamander (played by Eddie Redmayne) is not from Gryffindor, he bears no lightning scar, and he is well beyond the teenage wizard angst of the Harry Potter series. Instead of a Chosen One, our hero is a… Magizoologist. We meet…
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Toy Story. Dir. John Lasseter. Pixar. 1995.
‘You’ve got a friend in me’ is the catchphrase of Pixar’s first computer-generated feature-length film, Toy Story (1995), and this perfectly captures the relationships within the film; including those between the group of toys the plot centres around. The film follows the lives of these toys, in which the mix of human and animal characters come to…
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Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle. Dir. Andy Serkis. Netflix. 2018.
The film ‘Mowgli’ is a recent adaptation by Andy Serkis of the beloved Kipling story ‘The Jungle Book’. It is a fantasy adventure film and a beautifully aesthetic hybrid of live-action, CGI and motion picture that remains true to the original story in its exploration of the darker elements of the tale that follow the…
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Jumanji. Dir. Joe Johnson . TriStar Pictures . 1996.
Ever felt like your life was just one long game, and everything to happen was caused by the roll of a dice? No? Well try living 26 years inside Jumanji, a game where all of your psychological fears and anxieties manifest in the shape of wild animals, whether they are excessively oversized mosquitos and spiders,…
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Arrival. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. Paramount Pictures. 2016.
When I think of science fiction films, I immediately think of two things: aliens and explosions. Arrival plays with these expectations of the genre, asking the viewer to look at aliens in a way they’re not used to. Taking Villeneuve’s vision of the alien to be a non-human creature, it is appropriate to categorise the aliens in Arrival as…