Criterion Review: The Emigrants / The New Land
★★★★★ “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. /...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★★ “Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. /...
★★★★☆ “Treat people the way they should be treated.” Worthy sentiment is turned ambiguous in Jorge Riquelme Serrano’s unsettling class conflict drama. As a...
★★★☆☆ At its primeval heart, Nicolette Krebitz’s Wild is the story of a lonely girl, Ania (Lilith Stangenberg), and a wolf whom she happens...
★★★★☆ In The Greasy Strangler, disturbed darling of Sundance, director Jim Hosking and writing partner Toby Harvard have gifted us with the year’s weirdest...
★★★☆☆ Posters on buses, billboards and papers ponder “What did she see?”. The more pertinent question for much of The Girl on the Train...
★★★☆☆ Ava DuVernay’s 13th bites down on the gristly notion of the USA as ‘The Land of the Free’, chews with bitter discomfort and...
★★★☆☆ Playing in the Thrill section of the 2016 London Film Festival, Pyromaniac is a moody, elemental psychodrama set in an isolated Norwegian village...
★★★★☆ Justin Kelly’s King Cobra bravely re-tells the true story of gay porn icon Brent Corrigan (real name Sean Lockhart) and is by no...