Film Review: ‘Beyond the Hills’
★★★★☆ Awarded the coveted Palme d’Or prize back in 2007 for the desperately melancholic, Bucharest-set 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, acclaimed Romanian...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Awarded the coveted Palme d’Or prize back in 2007 for the desperately melancholic, Bucharest-set 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, acclaimed Romanian...
★★★☆☆ Ever since David Copperfield made a plane disappear, or David Blaine elevated himself above the ground, magic has taken on a rawer, less...
★★★☆☆ We’re not in the Shire anymore, Mr. Frodo. Former hobbit Elijah Wood cuts an immeasurably darker figure in Franck Khalfoun’s Maniac (2012), a...
★☆☆☆☆ They say the night is darkest just before the dawn. After ten minutes of the latest 1980s remake to hit UK cinemas, Dan...
★★★☆☆ Yves Montmayeur’s Michael H. Profession: Director (2013) comes at a time of heightened interest in the Austrian auteur, with his latest film, Amour...