Film Review: ‘The Choir’
★★★☆☆ With the continuous addition of films to the coming-of-age canon, it can often feel as though there is a dearth of originality. What...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ With the continuous addition of films to the coming-of-age canon, it can often feel as though there is a dearth of originality. What...
★★☆☆☆ A loose remake of the 1973 José Giovanni film of the same name, Rachid Bouchareb’s Two Men in Town (2014) transplants the original’s...
★★★★☆ Dr. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a linguist, someone who has made language acquisition her life’s work; she has literally written the book...
★★★★★ Mona Lisa, released in 1986 and written/directed by Irish poet and novelist Neil Jordan, shines out as a rough diamond, a masterpiece of...
★★★★☆ From the moody opening – a beautifully orchestrated slow-motion (and mostly silent) attack on a neon-lit nightclub – it’s immediately clear that Hyena...
★★☆☆☆ Lo and behold: Hollywood has produced the death knell in the slicker-than-a-baby-seal Focus (2015). It’s a good-looking genre piece, but the only con...
★☆☆☆☆ The inclusion and modern interpretation of literary classics like Homer’s The Iliad and tales of Oedipus the King juxtaposed with the detrimental dialogue...
★★★★☆ Diao Yinan’s noir tale Black Coal, Thin Ice (2014) bagged him the Golden Bear award at the 64th Berlin International Film Festival. For...