DVD Review: Les Combattants
★★★★☆ Winner of three prizes in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar last year, Thomas Cailley’s debut feature Les Combattants is an expertly handled and brilliantly...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Winner of three prizes in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar last year, Thomas Cailley’s debut feature Les Combattants is an expertly handled and brilliantly...
★★★★☆ A small farmstead is beset by a gang of ruthless mercenaries attempting to coerce the inhabitants from their land until a mysterious loner...
★★★☆☆ Just in case you thought fears of nuclear apocalypse were confined to the 1980s like leg warmers and aerobics, Tom Harper’s War Book...
★★★☆☆ This was supposed to be the year of Al Pacino’s big comeback. Instead, the lamentable The Humbling (2014), which saw the venerable actor...
★★★★☆ Harking back to the taut psychological thrillers of the late 1980s, where multiplex screens were littered with films calibrated towards adult audiences, Australian...
★★★★☆ Acquired by Vertigo Films after its glitzy Sundance premiere earlier this year, The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2015) – based on Phoebe...
★★★☆☆ Largely due to its popularity in the Indian sub-continent, cricket is now the second most popular sport in the world. In 2011, two...
★★★☆☆ The discovery of sexual identity propels Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays (2013). A woman struggles to impose masculinity on her body during a gender...