EIFF 2013: ‘Before You Know It’ review
★★★☆☆ After focusing predominantly on short film projects, director PJ Raval returns with only his second feature, Before You Know It (2013), a thoughtful...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ After focusing predominantly on short film projects, director PJ Raval returns with only his second feature, Before You Know It (2013), a thoughtful...
★★★★☆ Like the revered work of the artist himself, Renoir (2012) – director Giles Bourdos’ biopic of the French impressionist, starring Michel Bouquet, Vincent...
★★☆☆☆ Banned from Sydney’s Mardi Gras Film Festival due to its graphic real sex and ardently defended by friend-of-director James Franco, Travis Mathews’ I...
★★★★☆ Winner of the Crystal Bear at the 2012 Berlinale and Best Screenplay at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, Reis Çelik’s Night of Silence...
★★★★☆ “When you’re in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all”. This is the line that introduces Canadian Sarah Polley’s...
★★★☆☆ Examining the powerful bond shared between a father and daughter, Fredrik Edfeldt’s Sanctuary (Faro, 2013) is a nostalgic, innocent and handsomely presented drama...
★★★☆☆ The gravitational pull of cults served as the premise for director Zal Batmanglij’s previous collaboration with writer/actress Brit Marling, 2011’s Sound of My...
★★★☆☆ This (remarkably) is the way the world ends – not with a cataclysmic blast, but with an especially juvenile dick joke from a...