DVD Review: ‘Suite Française’
★★★☆☆ Given that its source material is a beloved book with a potent history, the film adaptation of Suite Française (2014) is a sincere...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ Given that its source material is a beloved book with a potent history, the film adaptation of Suite Française (2014) is a sincere...
★★★★☆ On his 40th birthday the Italian director Roberto Rossellini received a surprise gift. It was a letter from the Hollywood star Ingrid Bergman:...
★★★☆☆ Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up Philip (2014) follows a self-absorbed writer (Jason Schwartzman) who scuppers his fledgling career through sheer arrogance and misanthropy....
★★★★☆ Youth, beauty and mortality are potent themes in Olivier Assayas’ latest feature Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), starring Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart....
★★★★☆ It’s easy to mistake Ana Lily Armirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) as purely a mash-up of spaghetti western, horror...
★★☆☆☆ Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton play Alex and Ruth Carver in Ruth & Alex (2014), a wistfully bland property-based dramedy that comes off...
★★★☆☆ French filmmaker Mia Hansen-Løve isn’t exactly known for emotional subjectivity and visual bombast, so when a young raver tripping out in a field...
★★★★★ No cinematic genre can capture the inky morality of pernicious scavengers feeding on the carcass of post-war Europe like film noir. And no...