DVD Review: ‘Casa de Lava’
★★★★☆ Loosely based on Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Pedro Costa’s 1994 effort Casa de Lava (oddly titled Down To Earth...
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.
★★★★☆ With Luca Guadagnino’s terrific Challengers, the acclaimed director of Call Me By Your Name brings us the sub-genre we never knew we needed: the erotic tennis thriller.
★★☆☆☆ Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s “Abigail” mashes up crime caper and monster movie, but fails to deliver fear or humor. Spoilery trailers and unoriginal characters overshadow promising elements, resulting in a dull, lifeless experience lacking creativity and wit.
★★☆☆☆ Maïwenn’s French period drama Jeanne du Barry is the perfect opening salvo for the 76th Cannes Film Festival. It is as glitzy and gaudy as the festival itself, with its vacuous politics drowned out by the thunderous sound of it slapping its own back.
★★★★☆ Loosely based on Jacques Tourneur’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), Pedro Costa’s 1994 effort Casa de Lava (oddly titled Down To Earth...
★★★★★ Despite often being cited as one of the most important early Soviet filmmakers – primarily for his Soviet montage theory – the name...
★★★☆☆ French New Wave director Claude Chabrol’s latter career is rarely admired and often seen as his weaker period, yet with Rien Ne Va...
★★★★☆ Eureka Entertainment kick off a busy fourth quarter of business this week with the rerelease of three classic cinematic treats on Dual Format...
★☆☆☆☆ In 2007, Jon Sanders and Nora Hoppe wrote The Belgrade Manifesto, lamenting the stagnation of cinematic language and encouraging other directors to embrace...
★★☆☆☆ In war, there are many indignant grey areas suppressed from widespread knowledge, tacit actualities that rarely see the light of day. Whilst Jeremy...
★★☆☆☆ Getting to see the processes behind Heston Blumenthal’s wacky culinary experiments on various television shows is something that many members of the public...
★★☆☆☆ Writer/director Todd Solondz returns after a brief 3-year hiatus with Dark Horse (2011) – a film that takes a darkly droll approach into...