Film Reviews & More
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ American filmmaker Michael Mann returns to the big screen for Ferrari, a long-held passion project for the legendary director. As one would expect from the director of Heat and Miami Vice, this biopic is a well-mounted and handsomely shot study of men obsessed by their work, but never fully hits top gear.
★★★★★ Godzilla Minus One successfully blends horror-infused kaiju spectacle with an emotionally compelling storyline about grief, wartime trauma, and hope. The film’s world-class visuals, engaging characters, and socially relevant themes differentiate it from other entries in the franchise. It is a superlative monster movie.
“Trenque Lauquen” is an enigmatic film by Argentinian director Laura Citarella. It follows Rafa and Chicho’s search for the missing biologist, Laura, unraveling secrets along the way. Embedded within the narrative are flashbacks revealing Laura’s obsession with a school teacher’s affair and a connection with Chicho. The film concludes without resolution, deviating towards another unrelated mystery.
★★★★☆ Bradley Cooper is back in the director’s chair for another musically-oriented film, a biopic of the composer Leonard Bernstein entitled Maestro. And yet, this isn’t really a conventional biopic at all. Rather, it’s the portrait of a marriage between Bernstein (Cooper) and Felicia (a luminous Carey Mulligan who takes the headline credit). His career is more in the background, yet occasionally comes to the fore with exhilarating force.
★★★☆☆ Celebrated British director Joanna Hogg is back on the Venice Lido with The Eternal Daughter, a film shot in secret in lockdown and starring The Souvenir’s Tilda Swinton in dual roles as a mother and daughter heading to a hotel in the countryside for a much-needed birthday vacation.
★★★☆☆ American director Todd Haynes (Safe, Carol) returns to UK cinemas with May December, a Natalie Portman and Julianne Moore two-hander that asks the question: what if Brian De Palma remade Persona but as a comedy?
★★★★☆ When asked why he called his novel How to Be Good, novelist Nick Hornby replied because having “how” in the title boosts sales significantly. We’re all looking for guidebooks, even when we read novels or see films. The world is a scary and confusing place, and we need someone to show us the way.
★★★☆☆ The perennial theme of the hitman is so of the zeitgeist at the moment that just in this year’s Venice edition there are three films with the figure of the assassin as protagonist. Harmony Korine’s Aggro Dr1ft, Richard Linklater’s Hitman and now David Fincher’s The Killer join a culture neck-deep in John Wicks and Equalizers, Black Widows and Liam Neesons.
