Film Review: The Lovers and the Despot
★★★☆☆ Two subjects one would never expect to encounter in the same film; North Korea and cinephilia. They come together – bizarrely and fascinatingly...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ Two subjects one would never expect to encounter in the same film; North Korea and cinephilia. They come together – bizarrely and fascinatingly...
★★★★☆ The final film in a trilogy focusing on New York City, Ira Sachs’ latest feature Little Men, starring Jennifer Ehle and Greg Kinnear,...
★★★☆☆ Colm McCarthy’s second feature film, The Girl with All the Gifts is a gory and unsettling examination of the nature versus nurture dichotomy,...
★★★★☆ It is both continually amusing and rather unexpected that the most offensive exclamation uttered by a director famed for gun battles, bloody violence...
★★★☆☆ Rachel Lang’s Baden Baden is a simple story of an aimless woman returning to her hometown and building a new shower stall for...
★★★☆☆ Convention dictates that relationship dramas are, at their core, about the connection between two people. Although Tobias Nölle’s Aloys ostensibly adheres to this...
★★★★☆ “Shall we do this Whitechapel-style, then?” Doom-Head (Richard Brake) asks, rhetorically, to final girl Charly (Sheri Moon Zombie), in the penultimate scene of...
★★★☆☆ The Infiltrator does exactly what is says on the tin. This Bryan Cranston-led real life crime drama, telling of a lengthy undercover sting...