SIMON PARSONS is discomfited by an unflichingly negative portrait of motherhood and its trials
Film round-up: April 18, 2024
Vegan sermons, undercut snobs, fake messiahs and mash-up horror. The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews I Could Never Go Vegan, Jeanne Du Barry, The Book of Clarence, and Abigail
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I Could Never Go Vegan (12A)
Directed by Thomas Pickering
★★★
FILM-MAKER Thomas Pickering, who has never eaten meat in his life, embarks on a fact-finding mission to investigate people’s reasons and concerns as to why they could never go vegan.
These include lack of protein, being malnourished, and their love of bacon and cheese. The same old arguments that his mother was confronted with when she decided to stop eating meat back in the 1980s, as she informs him.
Pickering interviews health experts as well as vegan athletes and ordinary people doing extraordinary things such as 86-year-old Paul Youd, an ultramarathon runner who didn’t begin running until he was 82.
More from this author
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The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE review Cottontail, Memoir of a Snail, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, and Captain America: Brave New World
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MARIA DUARTE recommends a tense thriller that uses Palestinian characters to explore the predicament of migrants in Europe
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The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews September 5, The Fire Inside, Bring Them Down, and Love Hurts
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The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE is enthralled by a complex thriller, but advises caution in accepting its depiction of reality
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Hallucinogenic homosexuality, a quantum thriller, airport shenanigans and feminist Tolkein: MARIA DUARTE reviews Queer, The Universal Theory, Carry On and Lord of the Rings: The War of The Rohirrim
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The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Anora, Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, Blitz, and Heretic
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The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Sing Sing, Mandoob (Night Courier), Close To You, and The Count of Monte Cristo
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The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE reviews Made in England: The Films of Powell and Pressburger; Our Mothers; Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes; and The Almond and the Seahorse