Film Review: ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’
★☆☆☆☆ E.L. James fans waiting with bated breath need not be disappointed by Sam Taylor-Johnson’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2015), a perfectly anodyne Mills...
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In Reviews.
6 September 2024
Film Review: Firebrand
★★☆☆☆ “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.
26 July 2024
Film Review: About Dry Grasses
★★★★★ 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.
21 June 2024
Film Review: Green Border
★★★★☆ 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.
Reviews
Film Review: ‘Two Night Stand’
★★☆☆☆ Romantic comedy convention is condensed into forty-eight hours and a single apartment in Max Nichol’s debut, Two Night Stand (2014). Analeigh Tipton and...
Film Review: ‘Snow in Paradise’
★★☆☆☆ The first film from editor Andrew Hulme has a promising visual edge but is saddled by a style-over-substance formula that harks away from...
Film Review: ‘Philadelphia Story’
★★★★★ Time has been favourable to The Philadelphia Story (1940). Even as a septuagenarian, it still sizzles and simmers in fine form. Dubbed a...
Film Review: ‘Dancing in Jaffa’
★★★★☆ Using the optimistic innocence of children, Dancing in Jaffa (2013) succeeds in exploring the effect of explosive racial tensions in Israel between Jewish...
Film Review: ‘Coherence’
★★★☆☆ Western narratives have long been fascinated with fate, beguiled by those moments in the past where a decision irrevocably changes the direction of...
Berlin 2015: ‘Queen of the Desert’ review
★★☆☆☆ Revered Bavarian director Werner Herzog strains to marry his eccentric directorial style with the period epic in this rather stolid and strangely formal...
Berlin 2015: ‘Chorus’ review
★★★★☆ A festering beauty of a film slowly reveals itself in this bleak but uplifting black-and-white study of grief from Quebeçois director François Delisle,...
