Film Review: ‘Timbuktu’
★★★★☆ “Tire it, don’t kill it,” shouts a hunter to his party as they pursue a gazelle across the desert plain in a jeep....
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ “Tire it, don’t kill it,” shouts a hunter to his party as they pursue a gazelle across the desert plain in a jeep....
★★★☆☆ Results (2015) – the fifth film from Andrew Bujalski, the director of 2013’s Computer Chess – takes a while to find itself. Once...
★★☆☆☆ A forcedly feel-good British rom-com starring the quirkily charming Lake Bell and frenetic Simon Pegg as its screwball couple, Man Up (2015) falls...
★★★☆☆ There’s much to be said for genre films that strip things back to their fundamental elements and hit the ground running, shorn of...
★★☆☆☆ “I was the real thing once” claims the title character in Dan Fogelman’s misfiring dramedy Danny Collins (2015). Played by Al Pacino (who...
★★★☆☆ While a fellow adaptation rather than a remake, The Connection (with the rather pleasing alternative title of La French in its homeland) will...