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.
★★★★☆ American indie director Ira Sachs returns to UK screens with his comic romantic drama Passages, a pointed, revealing study of selfishness and an all-too familiar portrait of emotional indulgence, bolstered by three excellent lead performances.
★★★★☆ The long-suffering son of serial monogamist Sylvie (Anouk Grinberg), Abel (Louis Garrel) is immediately suspicious of her new (and third) husband, convict and ex-heist man Michel (Roschdy Zem). His fourth feature as director, Garrel’s The Innocent deftly mixes comic family melodrama with genre thrills in this pacy, emotive thriller with a killer cast.
★★★★☆ Two young friends, Leon (Thomas Schubert) and Felix (Langston Uibel), take a fateful working retreat in a forest cabin on Germany’s Baltic coast. German director Christian Petzold’s latest is a tense, emotionally fraught drama, layered with smouldering internal conflict that – by its incendiary close – invariably catches alight.
Planet Cinema, the premiere online film awards competition, has proudly unveiled the winners of its 2023 inaugural round, spotlighting a slew of innovative independent filmmakers. Leading the roster with an impressive nine awards and 11 nominations is Oh My Night from the Netherlands, directed by the prodigious Isis Mihrimah Cabolet.
Adrian Perez, founder of the Lonely Wolf International Film Festival, is elated to announce the official jury selection for its 2023 summer classifiers, now available on the official festival website, lonelywolffilmfest.com. The selection exemplifies the festival’s unwavering dedication to diversity and innovation in cinema.
★★★★☆ Promoting his latest work, a successful writer returns to his hometown and the site of his first love. Olivier Peyon’s sixth feature is a bittersweet bildungsroman told in reverse; a study of identity reconciled too late. In examining the reflexive, redemptive power of fiction, Lie With Me is a moving story of love lost to time.
★★★★☆ After an eleven-year hiatus, Rome-born director Emanuele Crialese returned to the cinema last year with the Venice premiere of this family drama. Now arriving on UK cinema screens, the 1970s-set L’immensità is a multilayered study of family life in disintegration.
★★☆☆☆ Trapped in an unhappy relationship and a life going nowhere fast, Cheyenne’s (Kristi Ray) discovery that she is pregnant gives her the kick that she needs to leave her partner, Alex (Hadyn Winston). American writer-director Erika Arlee’s debut feature showcases strong performances and nice visual flourishes, but A Song for Imogene struggles to find an emotional hook.
