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My 2017 film highlights
My annual film round-up, in which, as usual, I pick out 20 films to highlight, the only requirement being that I saw the film during 2017, regardless of when it was released. →
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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
Dane DeHaan is miscast, but otherwise I liked this. →
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Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets
I saw Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element on release in 1997, and immediately hated it. Being a cynical, sneering teenager, I had no time for the bright and colourful visuals, the self-consciously wacky characters, the broad, slapstick comedy, the baffling Lee Evans cameo. Eventually though, as the real world grew progressively duller and my hair increasingly greyer, I came to appreciate the film for what it was rather than what it wasn’t, and it’s now a film I check on every few years. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets has a lot in common with The Fifth Element, and having trained myself to appreciate the former, I found it easy to appreciate the latter. →