Film Review: Urban Hymn
★★★★☆ Debuting at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, British crime drama Urban Hymn is an impressively rounded character study set against the London riots...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Debuting at this year’s Glasgow Film Festival, British crime drama Urban Hymn is an impressively rounded character study set against the London riots...
★★★★★ Director Babak Anvari’s Under the Shadow uses the haunted house setup and classical filmmaking techniques expressly for political purposes. Former radical leftist Shedih...
★★★☆☆ How far can a fart joke get you? That’s the question posed by Sundance offering Swiss Army Man. The answer is surprisingly far,...
★★★☆☆ Southside with You is the film equivalent of a comfortable pair of familiar shoes, the feeling of sitting down into a cosy chair,...
★★★☆☆ Much has been made of the prominence of a ‘white saviour’ in biographical historical epic Free State of Jones. Is this a film...
★☆☆☆☆ At first glance The Fencer has a lot going for it. Set in Soviet occupied Estonia, it is the oddball tale – partly...
★★★☆☆ “Either I’m a psychopath in sheep’s clothing, or I am you.” Delivered by the principal subject of Rod Blackhurst and Brian McGinn’s Netflix...
★★☆☆☆ There are a few moments at the beginning of Antoine Fuqua’s The Magnificent Seven when it seems to make a case for its...