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.
★★★★☆ Georgian director Rati Oneli’s City of the Sun is in a constant dialogue with philosophical treatise and epic poetry, but the humanity shines through in his meditative exploration of a half-abandoned mining town. The title of City of the Sun is taken from a 1602 utopian text of the same name by Dominican philosopher Tommaso Campanella.
★★★★☆ Ain’t Them Bodies Saints director David Lowery channels slow cinema maestros Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Tsai Ming-liang in A Ghost Story, a beautiful meditation on grief, time and place. It doesn’t start out that way, though. Initially, A Ghost Story looks and feels like a stereotypical low-key US indie with subtle horror tropes.
★★★★☆ Golf is a gentleman’s game with oddly democratic principles. Its emphasis on precision over might allows young and old to play it side...
★★★★☆ Following three poorly received instalments and two franchise reboots courtesy of Sony Pictures, there’s a lot riding on Spider-Man’s (Tom Holland) prodigal return...
★★★☆☆ A David and Goliath tale of simultaneously familial and federal proportions, Steve James’ Abacus: Small Enough to Jail exposes the big bad establishment’s...
★★★★☆ The third in his thematic Bundesrepublik Deutschland trilogy, prolific German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Lola is a sumptuous, cynical historical satire, steeped in...
★★★★☆ Unreleased in the West since its 1991 release, Edward Yang’s historical epic A Brighter Summer Day is finally available through the Criterion Collection....
