Film Review: ‘Buttercup Bill’
★★★☆☆ “Like a murderer jumping outta nowhere in an alley, love has jumped in front of us, like a lightning strike.” This may seem...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ “Like a murderer jumping outta nowhere in an alley, love has jumped in front of us, like a lightning strike.” This may seem...
★★★★☆ Steve Oram’s directorial debut Aaaaaaaah! (2015) comes on like a collaboration between Dogme ’95 and Chris Morris. It’s hard to think of another...
★★★★☆ A fitting ode to the late, great Chilean filmmaker Raoul Ruiz (directed by his former editing partner and widow Valeria Sarmiento), it would...
★★★★☆ An Hitchcockian Berlin-set thriller, Christian Petzold’s Phoenix (2014) hinges almost entirely on its sensational finale; a near-perfect coda to a film that employs...
★★★☆☆ Fact and fiction intertwine in Medium Cool (1969), the combustible feature debut of celebrated cinematographer Haskell Wexler. This impeccable, director-approved transfer really helps...
★★★★☆ Thomas Hardy gets a hearty update in the newest adaptation of Far from the Madding Crowd (2015). A faithful adaptation of Hardy’s most...
★★★★★ “I’ve been through one too many youth movements” quips one fanzine writer in part one of this seminal documentary trilogy, but the sentiment...
★★★★☆ This visceral hip-hop biopic documenting NWA’s meteoric rise to fame at times struggles to avoid stumbling into Hollywood cliché. Still, Straight Outta Compton...