Berlin 2018: Damsel review
★★☆☆☆ Following on from the critical admiration he received for his starring turn in The Safdie brothers’ Good Time, Robert Pattinson finds himself in...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★☆☆☆ Following on from the critical admiration he received for his starring turn in The Safdie brothers’ Good Time, Robert Pattinson finds himself in...
★★★★☆ In opposition to other typically comical stories of later-life affirmation, Marcelo Martinessi’s The Heiresses is a film brooding with melancholy and a sense...
★★★★☆ Whatever happened to the humble canine being ‘man’s best friend’? This is exactly the question Wes Anderson poses in his sci-fi dystopian adventure Isle...
The 68th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival kicks off today with Wes Anderson’s Isle of Dogs. A return to the stop-motion animation...
★★★☆☆ For decades, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was heralded as a symbol of heroic resilience and resolve. Having stood by her husband Nelson throughout his arrest...
★★★★★ Elisa (Sally Hawkins) has strange scars on her neck that prevent her from speaking. When the scientists at the laboratory where she works...
★★★★☆ A deserving dark horse coming into the final furlong of Oscars ‘silly season’, Greta Gerwig enters the solo directorial fray with Lady Bird, a remarkably...
★★★★★ Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther is the film that will change everything. When you see it, you know that from here on in, everything...