Film Reviews & More
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Sean Baker is quickly establishing himself as one of the finest filmmakers in America today. With Starlet, Tangerine and The Florida Project, he has already displayed a precise and empathetic eye for those living the hardscrabble life at the skuzzy end of the American Dream.
★★★★★ Perhaps the biggest difference between The Souvenir and Part II is its shift towards comedy. Whereas the first film charted a doomed love affair, this second outing takes the aftermath of grief and the process of recovery, charting a surprisingly comic path.
★★☆☆☆ Returning to Cannes after the thrashing his last film, 2016’s The Last Face, received, Sean Penn is either a masochist or a recidivist and the kindest thing to say straight off the bat is that Flag Day is something of an improvement on his previous effort.
★★★★☆ Apichatpong Weerasethakul has been a stalwart of the arthouse circuit since his Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives won the Palme d’Or back in 2010. The Thai independent filmmaker has returned with Memoria, a beguiling and hypnotic and occasionally boring piece of work.
★★★★☆ No good deed goes unpunished, and such is the case for Rahim (Amir Jadidi), the protagonist of Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. Imprisoned for debt, he is on two-day leave when he meets up with his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) who might just have the answer to his problems.
★★★★☆ The French Dispatch of Wes Anderson’s latest film’s title is a fictional magazine, set up by proprietor and editor Arthur Howitzer Jr. (Bill Murray), a European supplement for a Kansas newspaper owned by his father.
★★★★★ “Counterintuitive, baby,” Adam Driver and Marion Cotillard sing to each other early on in Leos Carax’s latest Annette – and indeed it is. As with every good musical, there’s a grasp of the magnificent ridiculousness of the whole conceit. A full joyful embrace of the freedom and the rigours of the form, “We’re scoffing at logic,” they sing in a frank admission that the plot’s credibility might not be the highest priority.
★★★★☆ There’s only one thing sadder than the fate of a failed writer and that’s the fate of a successful writer. That’s the lesson this reviewer took home from Pietro Marcello’s bold interpretation of Jack London’s Martin Eden. The film transfers London’s semi-autobiographical hero from Oregon to Naples in a period that seems to span the turn of the century to the 1970s, giving a new spin to the idea of a timeless story.
