Film Review: ‘Spooks: The Greater Good’
★★★☆☆ British cinema faces an uphill struggle in making multiplex-friendly fare: producing films that will both appeal to fans of big budget blockbusters and...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ British cinema faces an uphill struggle in making multiplex-friendly fare: producing films that will both appeal to fans of big budget blockbusters and...
★★☆☆☆ There’s a moment around twenty minutes into Rosewater (2014) that’s so astoundingly awful in its pandering earnestness that it taints everything that follows....
★★★★☆ Cinema has recently been gifted with not one but two vital films on contemporary black girlhood. Both probe deep into the confines of...
★★☆☆☆ How ethical is it to pry into the personal life of an artist who actively shunned fame? That’s the questioned posited by Nikolas...
★★★☆☆ Brazilian-Algerian director Karim Aïnouz returns with Berlin Film Festival 2014 select Futuro Beach (2014), a tactile and deeply personal account of sexual identity...
★★★★☆ Painting has only “the speed of light to tell its story,” explains one tour guide in pro documentarian Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery (2014),...
★★★★☆ The shrouded world of the stage proved very much the theme of last year’s Venice Film Festival. Director Barry Levinson’s Philip Roth adaptation...
★★★☆☆ Mexican director (and now Oscar-winner) Alejandro González Iñárritu has toyed around with the elasticity of the medium before, most notably in the daringly...