Showroom Cinema with Andy Moore

Best Picture winner Parasite continues to take the UK box office by storm this week – a genuinely astonishing feat for a foreign language film, and one that’s bringing huge smiles to fans of world cinema everywhere.
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Greed

If you’ve still not seen it yet, we’ve got lots more opportunities to catch it at the Showroom Cinema this coming week.

For those of who you who’ve already seen Bong Joon-ho’s modern masterpiece though, this week sees the release of another biting satire about class, wealth, vanity and excess - though this time from much closer to home.

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Just as worthy of your time as the South Korean smash, Michael Winterbottom’s Greed stars Steve Coogan as self-made British billionaire Sir Richard ‘Greedy’ McCreadie.

For 30 years McCreadie has ruled the world of retail fashion – bringing the high street to the catwalk and the catwalk to the high street – but after a damaging public inquiry, his image is tarnished, and his retail empire in crisis.

To save his reputation, he decides to bounce back with a highly publicised and extravagant party celebrating his 60th birthday on the Greek island of Mykonos.

McCreadie is, of course, a thinly veiled caricature of Topshop tycoon Philip Green. And the film is a hilarious and riotously entertaining mockumentary that takes a much deserved shot at Green and his kind, revealing a carnival of obscene wealth, vanity and moral squalor.

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It’s perfect territory for Winterbottom, whose previous films include 24 Hour Party People, A Cock and Bull Story and The Trip.

Alongside Coogan, the film also stars heavyweights of British film and TV including Stephen Fry, David Mitchell, and Shirley Henderson.

Another utterly unique British gem hitting our screens this week is Little Joe. A must watch for fans of Charlie Brooker’s dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror, Little Joe tells the story of Alice, a single mother and dedicated senior plant breeder at a corporation engaged in developing new species.

Alice has engineered a very special crimson flower - remarkable not only for its beauty but also for its therapeutic value: if kept at the ideal temperature, fed properly and spoken to regularly, this plant makes its owner happy.

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Against company policy, Alice takes one home as a gift for her teenage son, Joe.

They christen it ‘Little Joe’ but as it grows, so too does Alice’s suspicion that her new creations may not be as harmless as their nickname suggests…

It’s an unsettling, enjoyably bizarre sci-fi drama with genuinely striking visuals that’s drawing comparisons to Stanley Kubrick’s work, as well as classics of the genre like Day of the Triffids.

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