Venice 2016: These Days review
★☆☆☆☆ Venice is notorious for foisting shoddy local produce on its delegates, but this year has been particularly chronic. Director Alberto Barbera admitted in...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★☆☆☆☆ Venice is notorious for foisting shoddy local produce on its delegates, but this year has been particularly chronic. Director Alberto Barbera admitted in...
★★★★☆ Natalie Portman must love Venice. When twirling psycho-ballerina drama Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan debuted on the Lido in 2010, Portman definitively glissaded away...
★★★☆☆ There’s a lot that’s wonderful about Andrei Konchalovsky’s Holocaust drama Paradise and yet there’s something fundamentally wrong with the film. Beginning in France...
★★★☆☆ Emir Kusturica enters the race for the Golden Lion with On the Milky Road, a bonkers Balkan wartime romance that, with its full...
★★★★☆ Pablo Larraín makes his English language debut with the Darren Aronofsky produced Jackie which, although more conventional, is no more a biopic than his...
★★★☆☆ Daniel Mantovani (Oscar Martinez) is a celebrated Nobel Prize-winning author living in Barcelona. He hasn’t returned to his hometown of Salas, Argentina in...
★★★☆☆ Following hot on the heels of the Cannes prize winner The Measure of a Man, French director Stéphane Brizé returns with his adaptation...
★★☆☆☆ Showing in the Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Vincent Biron’s Prank is a coming of age story that never...