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.
★★☆☆☆ The late British director Roger Michell’s final film, The Duke is based on the true story of Kempton Bunton (played here by Jim Broadbent), a pensioner from Benwell in Newcastle upon Tyne who, in 1961, stole Francisco Goya’s Portrait of the Duke of Wellington from London’s National Gallery.
★★★★☆ Following a group of teenage girls, La Mif is a nuanced and moving study of life in a care home in Geneva. No single performer – largely non-professional actors – in the piece stands above the rest. Rather, the cast work in unison to give a singular, outstanding ensemble performance.
The Toronto International Film Festival is long past and folks are now looking forward to this year’s Academy Awards – the 94th Academy Awards, to be precise. And you can almost be certain last month’s festival will have an impact on the upcoming Oscars.
★★★☆☆ Peter Middleton and James Spinney’s The Real Charlie Chaplin grapples with the conundrum at the heart of the silent era’s greatest clown: that no one could ever know really know the person behind the performance.
★★★★★ Adapted from the novel by Alexey Salnikov’s, Kirill Serebrennikov’s Petrov’s Flu is as dense and impenetrable as it is lurching, captivating and perplexing. It’s a captivating, purgatorial nightmare that describes the feverish breakdown of post-Soviet Russian society.
★★★★★ Flee is a thought-provoking exploration of one man’s flight from the Taliban’s tyranny in Afghanistan. Blurring traditional boundaries of documentary with rich, beautiful animation, director Jonas Poher Rasmussen has a great deal invested in telling this story.
The nominations for this year’s 94th Academy Awards were announced earlier this afternoon. Jane Campion’s Netflix western The Power of the Dog led the chasing pack with 12 nods, while Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune received 10.
This afternoon saw the nominations announced for this year’s British Academy Film Awards, to be held on March 13 back at its traditional home, London’s Royal Albert Hall, after a year online. Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune received the most nominations.
