Voicemails for Isabelle review – Netflix romcom picks creepy over cute

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Zoey Deutch and Nick Robinson stumble in this mushy, overlong story of a woman leaving voicemails for her dead sister There’s a fine line between romantic comedy and creepy thriller, and while redefining the genre’s lovelorn leads as often incredibly oddball stalkers is nothing new (see the Sleepless in Seattle trailer recut as a horror movie 20 years ago), an online deluge of memes and thinkpieces have elevated post-movie bar jokes to commonly accepted theory. Some film-makers have slowly tried to catch up and capitalise – last year’s dark comedy I Love You Forever showed how epic acts of romance can be rooted in manipulation while a great deal of what makes current box office record-breaker Obsession so effective is its horror movie perversion of the day-to-day realities of all-consuming true love. Netflix’s latest romcom Voicemails for Isabelle is made with some awareness of how unsettling its premise is, as if it was originally written in the 2000s and then dusted off and tweake...
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The American Sector review US road trip to hunt down remnants of the Berlin Wall

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This film tells the story of concrete slabs that have been rehomed thousands of miles away in bizarre yet unremarkable locations

Tracking down various segments of the Berlin Wall scattered all over the US, this eccentric yet down-to-earth documentary from Courtney Stephens and Pacho Velez traces how a historic artefact can mutate and splinter into myriad meanings. Transformed by their surroundings as well as the film-makers’ gaze, these concrete slabs are more than a symbol of the cold war; they have come to represent something quintessentially American.

From the midwest to California, state department halls to roadside restaurants, chunks of the wall can be found in the most unlikely of places. Most often positioned as a commemoration of history – and that loaded concept of “freedom” – the fragments are occasionally entirely untethered from their context, re-erected decoratively inside a Microsoft office or in the home of a private collector.

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