Film Review: The Daughter
★★★★☆ A group of old friends sit around a campfire. The mood is one of jovial recollection and reconnection, but as feather-light embers flit...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ A group of old friends sit around a campfire. The mood is one of jovial recollection and reconnection, but as feather-light embers flit...
★☆☆☆☆ The Trust is billed as a crime thriller-cum-black comedy. Unfortunately, this first outing from the brotherly directorial pairing of Alex and Benjamin Brewer...
★★★☆☆ The closing credit sequence of Adam McKay’s The Other Guys inexplicably plays out with infographics on ponzi schemes, the immorality of big bank...
★★★★★ Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s The Assassin is not quite like other wuxia movies. It shares a reverie in the natural world with King Hu’s A...
The 69th Cannes Film Festival was a strange menagerie of beasts. Front-loaded with perhaps too many of Thierry Frémaux’s usual suspects – Woody Allen,...
★★★★☆ Asghar Farhadi is a film director of such consistent quality and control that the prospect of one of his new films is like...
★★☆☆☆ Usually when we say a movie is reminiscent of the seventies, we mean it has a certain high quality to it redolent of...
★★★★☆ Following the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, which recorded Edward Snowden blowing the loudest of whistles, Laura Poitras arrives in Cannes’ Quinzaine sidebar with Risk,...