DVD Review: ‘Upstream Colour’
★★★★★ Shane Carruth’s second feature, Upstream Colour (2013), following an almost decade-long gap since his debut, the enigmatic time-travel film Primer (2004), is a...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★★ Shane Carruth’s second feature, Upstream Colour (2013), following an almost decade-long gap since his debut, the enigmatic time-travel film Primer (2004), is a...
★★☆☆☆ No stranger to tales of domestic intrigue, South Korean director Im Sang-soo follows up 2010’s well-received The Housemaid with the not-so-well-received The Taste...
★★★★☆ Dancing its way into a multitude of top ten lists at the end of last year came Noah Baumbach’s monochrome marvel Frances Ha...
★★★★☆ Cited by numerous contemporary fantasy filmmakers – Mexican maestro Guillermo del Toro included – as a major influence on their own consequent bodies...
★★★★☆ Cambodia’s official submission to the 2014 Academy Awards, Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013) fuses archive footage, stop-motion animation and voiceover in an...
★★☆☆☆ Director Justin Chadwick presents his protracted and ultimately disappointing biopic portraying the life of South Africa’s first democratically elected leader with Mandela: Long...
★☆☆☆☆ A quartet of venerable Hollywood greats come together to play supposed lifelong friends staging one last hurrah in Jon Turteltaub’s much delayed comedy...
★★★★☆ Amalgamating the best aspects of previous films The Fighter (2010) and Silver Linings Playbook (2012) whilst dispensing with a lot of the emotional...