Film Review: ‘The Dead Lands’
★★★☆☆ There’s much to be said for genre films that strip things back to their fundamental elements and hit the ground running, shorn of...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ There’s much to be said for genre films that strip things back to their fundamental elements and hit the ground running, shorn of...
★★☆☆☆ “I was the real thing once” claims the title character in Dan Fogelman’s misfiring dramedy Danny Collins (2015). Played by Al Pacino (who...
★★★☆☆ While a fellow adaptation rather than a remake, The Connection (with the rather pleasing alternative title of La French in its homeland) will...
★★★★☆ James Kent’s magnificent feature debut Testament of Youth (2014), based on Vera Brittain’s bestselling memoir about the First World War, is a real...
★★★★☆ “Polish films are… boring…” claims Engineer Mamon in Marek Piwowski’s The Cruise (1970), widely considered the country’s original ‘cult’ film. A tongue-in-cheek microcosm...
★★★★☆ In LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge, James Murphy charts the history of alternative music and places himself at every key scene along the...
★★★★☆ There are a number of key scenes in Columbian director Franco Lolli’s superb Gente de Bien (2014) – a playful title that means...
★★★★★ Signing a contract with a distributor rather than a studio might appear to be a very modern course of action for a star...