Film Review: Notes on Blindness
★★★★☆ Cinema may not seem like the natural medium to explore blindness. An art form dominated by images is surely ill-suited to the endeavour...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Cinema may not seem like the natural medium to explore blindness. An art form dominated by images is surely ill-suited to the endeavour...
★★☆☆☆ It’s been twenty years since the aliens invaded Earth in Roland Emmerich’s epochal Independence Day, and now they’re back to fulfil their world-destroying...
★★☆☆☆ European middleweights Emma Watson, Daniel Brühl and Michael Nygvist form a strong foundation on which to build a semi-political historical thriller. Though Florian...
★★★☆☆ It’s incredible to think that Absolutely Fabulous, the popular sitcom starring Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley, ran from 1992-2012. Some twenty-five years after...
★★☆☆☆ Untangling the web of politics, sex, drugs and power that weave together crime families is a massive undertaking within film. Much like political...
★★★★☆ Can memories be trusted to document the past? Visual artist Omar Fast’s ambitious debut Remainder, an adaptation of Tom McCarthy’s eponymous novel questions...
★★★★☆ Although Lorene Scafaria’s tender, bittersweet comedy The Meddler, starring Susan Sarandon and J.K. Simmons, is marred by the occasional cliché, it’s also an...
★★★☆☆ Heartstrings, prepared to be tugged at vigorously. Ma Ma is a quintessential tear-jerking melodrama that leans into its genre conventions heavily while still...