Film Review: Richard Linklater: Dream Is Destiny
★★★☆☆ In the two and a half decades since his first feature film Slackers debuted at New Directors/New Films in New York, Richard Linklater...
★★☆☆☆ “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 the two and a half decades since his first feature film Slackers debuted at New Directors/New Films in New York, Richard Linklater...
★★★☆☆ Imagine The Hours, but in this version Julianne Moore’s character, instead of reading Mrs. Dalloway, reads an airport thriller, a Lee Childs or...
★★☆☆☆ Ah, the lighthouse: visual metaphor of masculine vanity, anti-shipwreck device, and home to a solitary lighthouse keeper, desperate for company to keep him...
★★★★☆ We are taught from a young age never to judge a book by its cover. An idiom passed down from one generation to...
★★★★☆ The stakes of The Ivory Game couldn’t be higher. Make the wrong moves now, or fail to make the right ones, and within...
★★☆☆☆ Punctuated with kind of casual bursts of grim violence which will be familiar to anyone versed in Asian extreme cinema, The World of...
★★★★☆ The opening shot of Nicolas Winding Refn’s dreamlike tenth feature The Neon Demon sees Elle Fanning as rosy-cheeked model Jesse draped in macabre...
★★★★☆ “Nobody sees anyone as she is, let alone an actress playing a troubled young woman 40 years after her death. They see a...