DVD Review: ‘X+Y’
★★★☆☆ The evolution of The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon has acclimatised modern audiences to notion of tittering at the eccentricities of people on the...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ The evolution of The Big Bang Theory’s Sheldon has acclimatised modern audiences to notion of tittering at the eccentricities of people on the...
★★★☆☆ Ryan Reynolds deserves at least some credit for the patchwork of roles he’s picked recently. There’s the countless rom-coms, his superhero duds, acting...
★★★★☆ The dead-eyed cast of Roy Andersson’s A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) would appear just as home on the...
★★★☆☆ Xavier Dolan proves once again that the world revolves around him (and that’s a good thing) in the quiet Canadian drama Elephant Song...
★★★☆☆ With a hip-hop, cyberpunk aesthetic paying homage to 1980s classics Short Circuit (1986) and RoboCop (1987), by way of the critically derided Tank...
★★★★★ Touch of Evil (1958) proceeds with one of the most celebrated long-takes in screen history. The sequence is a marvel of technical virtuosity...
★★★★☆ Taking the step up from producer to director, with Love & Mercy (2014) Bill Pohlad successfully delivers a biopic like no other –...
★★★★☆ A scathing symposium on the fallacy of a ‘post-racial’ America, Justin Simien’s Dear White People (2014) aims to expose the myth that ‘racism...