Venice 2016: Voyage of Time review
★☆☆☆☆ Director? Malick? Where have you gone? There was a time when you took the lives of individual characters – sociopathic youth, itinerant workers,...
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.
★★★★☆ In Alex Garland’s Civil War, a group of journalists embark on a road trip to interview the US President amidst a second American Civil War, while exploring media’s dehumanizing relationship with violence.
★★★★☆ Having won the Jury Prize in 2013 for Like Father, Like Son and the Palme d’Or in 2018 with Shoplifters, Cannes favourite and Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda returns with Monster, a masterful work of intricate storytelling, complemented by a lovely score by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto.
★★★★★ Theodor Adorno famously wrote that poetry was not possible after Auschwitz, but is cinema? Billy Wilder certainly thought so, getting footage from the camps as evidence as much as anything else. Steven Spielberg, Claude Lanzmann, Alain Resnais and Roberto Benigni have all with differing degrees of success tried their hands.
★☆☆☆☆ Director? Malick? Where have you gone? There was a time when you took the lives of individual characters – sociopathic youth, itinerant workers,...
★☆☆☆☆ Venice is notorious for foisting shoddy local produce on its delegates, but this year has been particularly chronic. Director Alberto Barbera admitted in...
★★★★☆ Natalie Portman must love Venice. When twirling psycho-ballerina drama Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan debuted on the Lido in 2010, Portman definitively glissaded away...
★★★☆☆ There’s a lot that’s wonderful about Andrei Konchalovsky’s Holocaust drama Paradise and yet there’s something fundamentally wrong with the film. Beginning in France...
★★★☆☆ Emir Kusturica enters the race for the Golden Lion with On the Milky Road, a bonkers Balkan wartime romance that, with its full...