Film Review: Panic
★★★☆☆ In a city of millions, it isn’t right but it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others. Lost 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.
★★★☆☆ In a city of millions, it isn’t right but it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the suffering of others. Lost in...
★★★★☆ Early on in I, Olga Hepnarová the eponymous mass-murderer (played with rangy inscrutability by Machalina Olszanska) refers to a passage from Graeme Greene’s...
★★★☆☆ James Newell Osterberg Jr. is better known as Iggy Pop, inventor of the stage dive, proto-punk jester and the lead singer of The...
★★★★☆ Five years on from the final instalment of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, we return to the Wizarding World for an enchanting...
★★☆☆☆ There is an alternate universe in which Paul Schrader’s Dog Eat Dog – a brazenly disreputable and vicious crime caper – is a...
★★★☆☆ Has there ever been a pop culture phenomenon more endlessly discussed, analysed or obsessed over than Star Wars? Amongst its ever-expanding universe of...
★★★☆☆ Drone warfare is widely condemned on the basis of its relative safety and detachment from the horrors of combat. If you’re going to...
★★★★☆ On the surface, Anne Fontaine’s latest film The Innocents seems to have a lot in common with Pawel Pawlikowski’s recent masterpiece Ida. Both...