Criterion Review: Cat People
★★★★★ Hollywood producer Val Lewton was known for taking B-grade movie concepts handed to him by studio executives and elevating them to become more...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★★ Hollywood producer Val Lewton was known for taking B-grade movie concepts handed to him by studio executives and elevating them to become more...
★★★☆☆ While Juan Piqeur Simón’s 1988 infestation horror Slugs can hardly stand up to the broad appeal of the similarly-themed Arachnophobia, Critters or Tremors,...
In The Lovers and the Despot, Ross Adam and Robert Cannan recount the bizarre and fantastic story of Shin Sang-ok and Choi Eun-hee, two...
Strasbourg native Rachel Lang makes her feature debut with Baden Baden, a Franco-Belgian co-production that takes place in the director’s Alsatian borderlands hometown. A...
★★☆☆☆ There are a few moments at the beginning of Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven when it seems to make a case for its...
★★★☆☆ Two subjects one would never expect to encounter in the same film; North Korea and cinephilia. They come together – bizarrely and fascinatingly...
★★★★☆ The final film in a trilogy focusing on New York City, Ira Sachs’ latest feature Little Men, starring Jennifer Ehle and Greg Kinnear,...
★★★☆☆ Colm McCarthy’s second feature film, The Girl with All the Gifts is a gory and unsettling examination of the nature versus nurture dichotomy,...