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All the Old Knives
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Duplicity is only to be expected in a film about double agency... both in the way that it keeps leaping chronologically from present interviews to past events via a complicated series of interlocking flashbacks, and in its deft switching of genres.
Posted Mar 19, 2023
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Holy Shit!
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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the characterisation is as broad as the setting is narrow, with many of the jokey misfires starting to stink as much as Frank by the end.
Posted Mar 18, 2023
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The Cow Who Sang a Song Into the Future
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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This is not so much nature’s revenge as its renewal, in a film that, starting with a fecund river and ending in an arid desert, sings its weird lament for present loss and longing while still clinging vine-like to hope for future generations.
Posted Mar 18, 2023
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Adalynn
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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James Byrd’s post-partum tragi-horror shows a new mother’s flawed quest for perfection from the inside
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Here for Blood
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Daniel Turres’ besieged babysitter horror comedy pits a pro wrestler against a Lovecraftian cult while confounding both gender and genre
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Little Bone Lodge
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Matthias Hoene’s Psycho-thriller pits fugitive criminal brothers against one very determined mother, equally protective and vindictive
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Pensive
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Jonas Trukanas’ (and Lithuania’s) first slasher carves up co-ed adolescents as their acts of transgression expose them to punishment
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Agatha
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Kelly Bigelow Becerra and Roland Becerra’s rotoscoped debut feature is a hermetic, home-made vision of bewitching ritual in a diseased America
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Have Hold Take
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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D.C. Hamilton and Brinna Kelly’s wedding night psychodrama accommodates hallucinatory scenes from a marriage
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Repulse
(2021)
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Anton Bitel
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Emil Krizka’s chronology-counfounding feature debut is a traumatic tale of two very different families united in deep dysfunction and damage
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Mother Superior
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Marie Alice Wolfszahn’s feature debut is a Seventies-set feminist gothic, allegorising the eternal struggle between the sexes.
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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The Weird Kidz
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Zach Passero’s affectionate Eighties-inflected animated monster movie lets teen rites of passage camp alongside adult ritual
Posted Mar 15, 2023
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Monolith
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Telling a story that confounds what is real with what is mere delusion, and what is external with what is internal, Monolith wraps its coded message in an obscuring coat of irrationality
Posted Mar 14, 2023
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Ash and Bone
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Harley Wallen’s small-town serial killer thriller is a tale of two dysfunctional families coming into violent collision.
Posted Mar 13, 2023
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The Last Deal
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Like a gangster film set in the Prohibition era, this chronicle of the Green Rush shows a criminal underworld unnecessarily but inevitably maintained by market forces during a War on Drugs in its last gasp.
Posted Mar 12, 2023
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The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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while certainly a sci-fi horror... also something else besides: an exploration of the African-American experience of being marginalised, demonised, patronised, oppressed and zombified by a society in need of radical revivification
Posted Mar 12, 2023
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The Night of the 12th
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Dominik Moll’s police procedural runs circles around the misogyny entrenched in patriarchal society.
Posted Mar 11, 2023
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Molli and Max in the Future
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Michael Lukk Litwak’s feature debut is a retrofuturist lo-fi sci-fi romantic comedy satirising the here and now
Posted Mar 11, 2023
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Freeze
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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the low budget, the perfunctory dialogue, the bare-bones characterisation and the unconvincing rubber-suited monsters combine to drain away any of Lovecraft’s trademark dread.
Posted Mar 11, 2023
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Onyx the Fortuitous and the Talisman of Souls
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Andrew Bowser’s comedy horror lets an arrested incel act out his occult fantasies.
Posted Mar 11, 2023
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Hunt Her, Kill Her
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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an allegory of (a) woman’s travails in an unequal men’s world, where every day (and night) is a struggle for survival, and for a better future.... It is a lean, taut, tense thriller in which male predators had better prey.
Posted Mar 11, 2023
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#chadgetstheaxe
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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In Travis Bible's comic but dispiriting screen-life feature, narcissistic livestreamers meet their match in a real-world killer cult
Posted Mar 10, 2023
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Jack
(2021)
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Anton Bitel
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Pelayo De Lario’s microbudget, metacinematic sex comedy shows an aspirant if immature film student (repeatedly) coming of age.
Posted Mar 10, 2023
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Country Gold
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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...this night of sex and drugs and country-and-western encompasses the arrogance of success, the fleetingness of celebrity and the ravages of time itself. And like all the best country songs, it comes steeped in melancholy and regret.
Posted Mar 09, 2023
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Sound of Silence
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Alessandro Antonaci, Stefano Mandalà & Daniel Lascar’s misophonic ghost story sends a history of domestic violence echoing across the airwaves
Posted Mar 07, 2023
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Unicorn Wars
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Alberto Vázquez’s animated (d)evolutionary allegory faces a group of cute teddy bears with their Vietnam and their Apocalypse
Posted Mar 06, 2023
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Pearl
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Ti West’s horror prequel sours the conventions of Golden Age melodrama, while unhinging the American dream with harsh reality
Posted Mar 05, 2023
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The Astronaut
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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In Nicolas Giraud’s drama of celestial dreams and earthly gravity, a middle-aged amateur rocketeer attempts to leave Earth
Posted Mar 05, 2023
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Skin Deep
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Alex Schaad’s body-swapping lo-fi sci-fi is a dysphoric drama of depression, alienation, transition and extreme empathy
Posted Mar 04, 2023
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Tropic
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Edouard Salier’s drama is a spacebound sci-fi of siblings and separation, as an accident confronts twins with their differences
Posted Mar 04, 2023
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Mister Organ
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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David Farrier’s documentary feature is a study in sociopathy, as the filmmaker and his gaslighting subject play mind games
Posted Mar 02, 2023
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Adopting Audrey
(2021)
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Anton Bitel
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M. Cahill’s story of surrogacy sees a rootless, drifting young woman finding herself in a family not her own
Posted Mar 02, 2023
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Stone Turtle
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Ming Jin Woo's mythomanic mystery places characters on an island of lost souls in search of elusive revenge and closure
Posted Mar 01, 2023
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The Artifice Girl
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Franklin Ritch’s sci-fi sees a team hunting sexual predators while tackling the ethics of technological singularity
Posted Mar 01, 2023
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Nightsiren
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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a film less about female malefactors than about the villagers’ partriarchal structures and deep-seated misogynies (some internalised by the local women themselves) which suppress difference and readily blame innocent women.
Posted Feb 28, 2023
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Nocebo
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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an angry allegory, marking the iniquities in global capitalism, while furnishing satisfaction in a fantasy of folk revenge and generational change.
Posted Feb 24, 2023
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Therapy Dogs
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Here adolescent experience is both universal, and fleeting – and Eng has crafted an elegiac if vibrant record of its passing.
Posted Feb 23, 2023
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Mind Leech
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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a modest, affectionate portrait of an emerging, entirely avoidable ecological disaster that starts small, and sucks only in a good way.
Posted Feb 22, 2023
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Gateway
(2021)
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Anton Bitel
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Niall Owens’ suburban, increasingly supernatural crime drama confronts a group of would-be weed growers with grief and guilt
Posted Feb 21, 2023
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The Civil Dead
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Breezily funny yet also melancholic and cruel, The Civil Dead is not only a paranormal parable of friendship’s prisonhouse, but also an allegory of Clay’s creative process...
Posted Feb 14, 2023
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Consecration
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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paranormal parable where everybody, on every side, is trying to do the right thing – with bloody, if perhaps not quite diabolical, consequences.
Posted Feb 09, 2023
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The Outwaters
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Robbie Banfitch’s low-budget found footage freakout documents a desert disappearance from the inside
Posted Feb 08, 2023
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Unconformity
(2021)
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Anton Bitel
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Jonathan DiMaio’s feature debut exposes a desert-set human drama to a broader geological perspective
Posted Feb 06, 2023
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Super Z
(2021)
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Anton Bitel
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the humour here is as low as the characters, all fart and dick jokes, swearing and salaciousness, with a puerile bent that many will find hard to swallow even in small doses. It is a rotten mess...
Posted Jan 29, 2023
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A Hole in My Heart
(2004)
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Anton Bitel
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there is a core of humanity that slowly emerges from all the squalor and perversion
Posted Jan 28, 2023
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Lilya 4-Ever
(2002)
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Anton Bitel
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Lukas Moodysson’s drama of innocence lost and love exploited is hard-hitting and relentlessly depressing.
Posted Jan 28, 2023
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Waking Karma
(2023)
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Anton Bitel
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Carlos Montaner and Liz Fania Werner’s Oedipal ‘cult’ movie confronts an adolescent girl with her family’s horrific legacy
Posted Jan 28, 2023
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Murder, Anyone?
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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James Cullen Bressack’s genre-fluid film-within-a-film is a monstrously meta memorial to the director’s father
Posted Jan 18, 2023
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The Execution
(2021)
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Anton Bitel
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Lado Kvataniya’s feature debut is a gritty, twisty serial killer thriller, allegorising true crime in a mimesis of murder
Posted Jan 14, 2023
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Fairways to Happiness
(2022)
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Anton Bitel
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Doug Morrione’s documentary feature is all at once study in contentment, Dubai city symphony and golfing parable
Posted Jan 10, 2023
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