Glasgow London Cinema Debate Group

Kitty Green’s The Royal Hotel — starring the superb Julia Garner — is a brilliantly unsettling modern thriller that uses the framework of outback noir to dissect misogyny, power and the casual menace lurking beneath “blokey” hospitality culture. Adapted from shocking real events, the film follows two backpackers taking bar work in a remote Australian mining town, where friendliness gradually curdles into intimidation and threat. Critics praised its razor-wire tension, dark humour and icy precision, with Garner delivering a performance of extraordinary restraint and intelligence. At once gripping entertainment and sharp social satire, The Royal Hotel skewers performative masculinity, alcohol-soaked bravado and the way predatory behaviour is normalised as “just a joke” — making it one of the most provocative and fiercely discussed films of recent years.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-royal-hotel-movie-review-2023

Zoom meetings 8pm
https:/l/us02web.zoom.us/j/5180166433
Meeting ID: 518 016 6433

Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is one of the great modern love stories: funny, heartbreaking, wildly inventive and emotionally devastating in equal measure. Written by Charlie Kaufman and starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet at the very peak of their powers, the film takes a dazzling science-fiction premise — the erasure of painful memories after a breakup — and transforms it into something profoundly human. Critics hailed it as a masterpiece of modern cinema: visually playful, philosophically rich and emotionally raw, with Gondry’s dreamlike practical effects giving the film a handmade magic that still feels utterly unique.

But beneath its surreal conceit lies a piercing meditation on memory, longing and the impossibility of neatly editing our emotional lives. As Joel revisits the collapsing fragments of a failed relationship inside his own mind, the film satirises the modern desire to erase discomfort, shortcut grief and curate experience into something painless and controllable. Tender, strange and endlessly discussable, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind remains a rare film that is both intellectually exhilarating and deeply romantic — the kind of cinema that leaves audiences haunted, moved and arguing about it long into the night.

https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/eternal-sunshine-of-the-spotless-mind-2004

Zoom meetings 8pm
https:/l/us02web.zoom.us/j/5180166433
Meeting ID: 518 016 6433