Film Review: ‘Mommy’
★★★★★ Prodigious Canadian director Xavier Dolan returned to Cannes last year with his most accomplished film to date, the marvellously cinematic spectacle Mommy (2014),...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★★ Prodigious Canadian director Xavier Dolan returned to Cannes last year with his most accomplished film to date, the marvellously cinematic spectacle Mommy (2014),...
★★★☆☆ Euphemia ‘Effie’ Gray was just twelve years old when esteemed Victorian art critic and writer John Ruskin wrote a novel for her called...
★★★☆☆ Meditations on art, mortality and performance are the lofty thematics explored in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), a discursive drama from French director...
★★★☆☆ One of this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award hopefuls, Argentinian director Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales (2014) is an exuberant, obsidian-black comedy...
★★★★☆ If you thought ice hockey was just Canadians and punch-ups, then Gabe Polsky’s documentary Red Army (2014) may come as a cool eye-opener....
★★★★☆ Tragedy says “We all die”, whilst comedy says “Ah, but life goes on”. The winner of last year’s Golden Lion, Roy Andersson’s first feature...
★★★★☆ Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou (2014) has enjoyed considerable praise since it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section back at the Cannes Film Festival...
★★☆☆☆ Julius Avery’s debut feature Son of a Gun (2014) starts promisingly in a maximum security prison where young JR (rising star Brenton Thwaites)...