Film Reviews & 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.
★★★★☆ Don’t be fooled by the banal title – there’s a great deal of interest beneath the pastel hues and fine furnishings of Slovenian director Olmo Omerzu’s Family Film. Indeed, the title itself is the first of many sardonic misdirections in a piece whose screenplay delights in about-turns and ratcheting melodrama.
★★★★☆ “Everyone says: ‘Less emotion, less emotion.’ How can anyone act without emotion?” So complains the eponymous veteran actress in Slovakian drama Eva Nová. She’s lamenting her plight; unemployed and at the mercy of modern, young directors and contemporary conventions towards minimalism.
★★★☆☆ There’s a distinct whiff of Mike Leigh running through Waves, the fiction feature debut of Polish director Grzegorz Zariczny. A social realist drama about the difficulties facing working families, it is constructed with autobiographical details proffered by its non-professional lead actresses who also work-shopped improvisation within the narrative.
★★★☆☆ Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture used clay figurines to represent the non-existent images of the Khmer Rouge’s reign in Cambodia to startling effect and wide acclaim. Having survived the regime’s genocide in the late seventies, Panh has spent much of his career delving into his country’s bloody history and he returns again to the subject matter with Exile.
★★★★☆ A fantastic quote from Canadian public intellectual Marshall McLuhan prefaces Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg’s absorbing campaign documentary Weiner. “The name of a...
★★★★☆ The Weltanschauung of New York’s upper-middle intelligentsia is almost custom built for a good run- a-round comedy of manners. Rebecca Miller’s latest film,...
★★★★☆ A Poem is a Naked Person is pretty far out, man. In the very loosest sense of the term a documentary biopic of...
★★★★★ It’s hard to find the words to adequately describe the breathtaking magnitude and harrowing brilliance of Son of Saul. More than seventy years...
