Interview: Brian De Palma talks ‘Passion’
Starring Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams, Passion (2012) sees American director Brian De Palma return to his favourite stomping ground of the overblown psychosexual...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
Starring Noomi Rapace and Rachel McAdams, Passion (2012) sees American director Brian De Palma return to his favourite stomping ground of the overblown psychosexual...
Mexican auteur Carlos Reygadas’ fourth film, Post Tenebras Lux (2012), has been described by some as his masterpiece. It’s a bracingly intelligent and formally...
★★★★☆ Centring on one long, hot summer in the lives of two Bratislavan youths as they fall in and out of love, The Sun...
★★★★☆ Dror Moreh’s Oscar-nominated debut is one of the best documentaries to emerge so far this year. Presenting a troubling vision of Israeli counter-terrorism,...
★★★★☆ After co-writing Larry Clarke’s Palme d’Or-nominated cult smash Kids (1995), then directing Gummo two years later, director Harmony Korine has spent the majority...
★★★☆☆ Writer, actor and director Lena Dunham first burst onto the scene back in 2010 with her feature debut Tiny Furniture. Two years later,...
★★★☆☆ A reboot/rehash/reimagining of Sam Raimi’s 1981 cult horror hit The Evil Dead (so successful at the time as to spawn two manic sequels,...
★★★★☆ Poetic in form yet piercingly haunting in function, Pat Collins’ Silence (2012) is a truly absorbing sensory experience. Imbuing documentary-style filmmaking with a...