Blu-ray Review: ‘Hard to Be a God’
★★★★☆ Aleksei German’s epic Dark Ages sci-fi Hard to Be a God (2013) took over a decade to make its way onto DVD and...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Aleksei German’s epic Dark Ages sci-fi Hard to Be a God (2013) took over a decade to make its way onto DVD and...
★★★★☆ It’s been more than two decades since audiences last got to see a new film from visionary Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, with Frank...
★★★★☆ There was a shot in Joss Whedon’s box office behemoth Avengers Assemble (2012) which set fan’s tongues a-wagging when it popped up in...
★★★★☆ Pasolini (2014) is another key work in Abel Ferrara’s terrific late master period. A biopic of the final days of Italian polymath Pier...
★★★☆☆ There has always been a wide appeal to the myth of the Kray brothers, who ruled London’s underworld in the Swinging Sixties. Now...
★★☆☆☆ As yet another slinky jazz number kicks in and that all-too-familiar credit typeface appears, there’s still something undeniably comforting about slipping back into...
★★★★☆ Jon Stewart’s assured directorial debut Rosewater (2014) is a dramatic reconstruction of the real-life arrest and detention of Iranian-Canadian filmmaker and journalist Maziar...
★★★★☆ Céline Sciamma proves with new film Girlhood (2014) that she’s adept at crafting universally accessible coming-of-age stories. In this newest go-round, Sciamma trains...