Film Review: ‘Big Boys Gone Bananas!*’
★★★☆☆ Amongst the skyless summits of capitalist bureaucracy flutters creativity that no company can overturn. Big Boys Gone Bananas!* (2011), Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten’s...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ Amongst the skyless summits of capitalist bureaucracy flutters creativity that no company can overturn. Big Boys Gone Bananas!* (2011), Swedish filmmaker Fredrik Gertten’s...
★★★★☆ Unless you’re a fashion aficionado, chances are you’ll have never heard of Diana Vreeland, the former editor of Vogue and irresistibly charismatic subject...
★☆☆☆☆ Ol Parker follows up 2005’s Imagine Me & You with Now Is Good (2012), the tale of a young girl, Tessa (Dakota Fanning),...
★★☆☆☆ It’s taken an entire decade for American filmmaker Tanya Wexler to complete her third feature, and on the evidence of the farcical Hysteria...
★★★★☆ Having won a handful of prestigious awards and broken box office records across the globe, French Oscar entry Untouchable (The Intouchables, 2011) finally...
★★★☆☆ Oliver Stone’s weed-fuelled crime caper Savages (2012) is probably the US director’s best offering since 1999’s Any Given Sunday, but after a thirteen...
★★★★☆ Palme d’Or nominee Killing Them Softly (2012) may only be Andrew Dominik’s third full-length feature, but already the Kiwi director has set himself...
★★★★☆ Released on DVD for the first time in the UK courtesy of Mr Bongo, Grigori Kozintsev’s big screen adaptation of Miguel de Cervantes’...