Blu-ray Review: ‘The Killing Fields’
★★★★☆ Ironically, the romance of war is undying. It’s a perpetual cinematic winner with all the emotional aphorisms habitually overkilled by hyperbole; the realities...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Ironically, the romance of war is undying. It’s a perpetual cinematic winner with all the emotional aphorisms habitually overkilled by hyperbole; the realities...
★★★★☆ Jon Favreau returns from the creative wilderness following 2011’s tepid and workmanlike Cowboys & Aliens, cooking up something entirely different with latest offering...
★★★☆☆ “Everyone bonded with each other who could skate and we were complete pricks to people that couldn’t,” goes Tas Pappas; one half of...
Born from its namesake – the widely distributed art and culture magazine – and having doubled the number of films screening since their first...
★★★★★ More American nightmare than American Dream, Jesse Moss’ Sundance award-winning documentary The Overnighters (2013) looks at the crisis at the centre of the...
★★★☆☆ The inaugural directorial effort of The Bourne Legacy (2012) screenwriter Dan Gilroy, Nightcrawler (2014) is a nocturnal exploration of media sensationalism and the...
★★★★★ We see a long shot of two maids, rapt in their whispers, walking down the length of an embankment. The first flickers of...
★★★★★ Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) is a talismanic work of art, a piece of cinema that reaches through the ages to comment...