CineVue
For the latest reviews of arthouse, documentary and indie film in cinemas and on the festival circuit.
★★★☆☆ Movies love certain professions and psychotherapy is certainly one. They have to listen to people’s problems while (usually) masking their own issues. From Richard Burton in Equus to Billy Crystal in Analyse This, there’s an undoubted attraction to a job which involves lots of listening to other people’s stories. Continue Reading
★★★★☆ A revelation on a bike ride in France leads to a rift between two childhood friends, but through thick and thin, uphill and downhill, friendship proves surprisingly and hearteningly durable in Michael Angelo Covino’s The Climb. Kyle (Kyle Marvin) and Mike (Michael Covino) are BFFs on holiday in France Continue Reading
It’s been a vintage edition of the Cannes Film Festival, with many excellent contenders in the competition. The Palme d’Or went to South Korean director Bong Joon-ho and his masterful black comedy thriller Parasite. It was a popular choice that bested Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ It’s time Cannes called a moratorium on screening the films of French director Arnaud Desplechin until he can come back with work as good as A Christmas Tale. Oh Mercy! has no business competing for the Palme d’Or. Co-written with Léa Mysius, who penned the equally dull Ismael’s Ghosts Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ A family assemble for a vacation in Portugal and to confront a looming loss in Ira Sachs’ gentle talkathon, Frankie. The film takes place in the Portuguese city of Sinta, a beautiful location, and a family of disparate elements have gathered here to swim, eat and walk, but mainly to Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Going in cold, the Dardenne brothers appearing to tackle the subject of radical Islam and a vulnerable boy falling prey to its teachings might be construed as reactionary and misguided. In their skilled and compassionate hands, however, Young Ahmed is a riveting story of a boy in crisis. “A Continue Reading
★★★★☆ A highly flammable love affair smoulders in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire. Marianne (Noémie Merlant) is a painter with a spark in her eye. Although she is always aware of convention and tradition, she also knows how to bend the rules to further her own pursuit Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Chinese director Diao Yinan’s first film in five years, The Wild Goose Lake is a gangster flick mainlining on pure fatalism and turns the tables on genre conventions and expectations. The result is an occasionally opaque but tremendously well-made melodrama. When mobster Zhou Zenong (Ge Hu) accidentally shoots down Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán’s The Cordillera of Dreams caps off an astonishing set of history-focused essay films, beginning with Nostalgia for the Light and continuing with The Pearl Button. The trilogy represents one of the great artistic statements of the decade. Closer to home geographically, personally and spiritually, than Continue Reading
★★★★★ There’s something heartening about genius being put in the service of madness. Already this Cannes we’ve seen the exemplar in a fully restored 4K version of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, but at the Quinzaine a sea-change took place. Robert Eggers’ The Lighthouse is something rich and strange, but also Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Austrian director Jessica Hausner enters the race for this year’s Palme d’Or at Cannes with Little Joe, a modest work of satirical sci-fi starring Emily Beecham and Ben Whishaw as two genetic engineers who create a “happy” plant. Alice (Beecham) is a scientist who has developed a plant whose Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Following his 2016 Palme d’Or triumph with I, Daniel Blake, Ken Loach returns to the Cannes Film Festival with Sorry We Missed You, a furious denunciation of zero-hours Britain. We begin in a familiar place: in the dark. A man with a Mancunian accent is being interviewed for a Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ A joint effort between Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, Bacurau is an acid western depicting a ragtag group fighting back against the outsiders who wish to do them harm. Picture Howard Hawks’ classic Rio Bravo, only the heroes are tripping out on ayahuasca. A blood-soaked anti-imperialist fable and Continue Reading
★★★★☆ From its powerful far right-baiting opening image of a football-mad French kid of Arabic heritage draped in the country’s iconic flag to an unsettling and mayhem-filled finale, Ladj Ly’s gripping play on Victor Hugo’s humanist masterwork, Les Misérables, is uncompromising, angry-as-hell political cinema. Set over the course of two Continue Reading
★★☆☆☆ Arch American indie icon and silver fox Jim Jarmusch lurches up the Cannes Croisette with the opening film The Dead Don’t Die, an undeadpan comedy which dies halfway through and fails to reanimate itself. Jarmusch’s previous exercises in genre have been triumphant morphings of cinema staples into his own Continue Reading