DVD Review: ‘Best of Enemies’
★★★☆☆ The 1968 television debates between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, which accompanied that year’s Republican and Democratic conventions, had an impact...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ The 1968 television debates between William F Buckley Jr and Gore Vidal, which accompanied that year’s Republican and Democratic conventions, had an impact...
★★★★☆ “Our scenario begins with the arrival. Your arrival. Welcome to our planet.” These words form the basis of Michael Madsen’s The Visit (2015);...
★★☆☆☆ In Al Gore’s 2006 sobering documentary An Inconvenient Truth the man who “used to be the next President of the United States” relied...
★★★☆☆ A cursory Google search for ‘Charlie Hebdo’ reveals that the satirical magazine continues to fly dangerously close to the sun. Less than a...
★★☆☆☆ Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) came under heavy fire from some quarters for not being strident enough in its disavowal...
★★★☆☆ Davis Guggenheim opens his latest documentary, He Named Me Malala (2015), with its most essential element – the voice of Malala Yousafzai. Instantly...
★★★★☆ In the opening moments of Karen Guthrie’s understated and extremely moving The Closer We Get (2015) her car glides along darkened roads at...
★★☆☆☆ A meticulously coiffed Bradley Cooper cruises around town on a superbike. Haute cuisine relies just as heavily on presentation as actual substance and...