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.
★★★★☆ With Lynch/Oz, renowned film studies documentarian Alexandre O. Philippe turns his attention to the celebrated, surrealist oeuvre of David Lynch: in particular, the director’s recurring fascination (arguably, obsession) with 1939’s MGM classic The Wizard of Oz.
Returning for its 26th edition and with 2021’s Covid restrictions largely a thing of the past, Tallinn’s Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF) this year crowned Hilmar Oddsson’s Icelandic dark comedy Driving Mum as the 2022 Grand Prix winner, with the Best Director award going to Ahmad Bahrami for thriller The Wastetown.
★★★★☆ A chance encounter between a pharmacist and a footballer opens up a world of magic and romance in Aleksandre Koberidze’s second feature, an endlessly enchanting fable from the Georgian director. Its story and emotions are as universal and quotidian as they come.
Coming from a background in photography and cinematography, Alejandro Loayza Grisi embarked on his directorial career with Utama, the tale of an elderly Quechua couple wrangling llamas in the Bolivian highlands.
★★★★☆ Alejando Loayza Grisi’s award-winning debut feature, Utama is an understated but spectacularly mounted drama about an ageing Quechua couple tending llamas on the edge of civilisation. They live in a very modest stone house that looks out onto the Bolivian altiplano.
★★★☆☆ Maria Schrader’s She Said goes behind the scenes of how The New York Times journalists led the charge in bringing down Harvey Weinstein. One of the most successful film producers of all time, he was also a sexual predator who used his wealth, privilege and power to destroy the lives of countless women.
★★★★★ Bones and All is a savage, swooning 1980s-set tale of first love and finding one’s place in the world. Observational but mysterious, also political and anti-nostalgic, Luca Guadagnino’s road trip to the States finds equal amounts of horror and beauty at every turn.
★★★★★ Parents are normal people too. They might not seem it but once you have a kid, you become a care provider, a hotelier, a therapist, a nurse, a taxi driver, a chef and a thousand other things. You become mum or dad and the idea that you too might have a life is something that shrinks.
