Film Review: ‘Life Itself’
★★★☆☆ When Gene Siskel – Roger Ebert’s partner on the pioneering movie review show Siskel & Ebert at the Movies – was diagnosed with...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ When Gene Siskel – Roger Ebert’s partner on the pioneering movie review show Siskel & Ebert at the Movies – was diagnosed with...
★★★☆☆ The decision to cast Benedict Cumberbatch as unsung war hero Alan Turing in Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game (2014) was a canny, albeit...
★★★☆☆ The Drop (2014), Michael R. Roskam’s respectable follow-up to 2011’s Bullhead, finds the Belgian director on different shores, working from a Dennis Lehane...
★★★★☆ The intensity of language and the beauty it conveys are visually explored in Chang-dong Lee’s Poetry (2010), a film which manages to fashion...
★★★★☆ There aren’t many filmmakers who would want – let alone have the capacity – to make audiences gag and guffaw in equal measure....
★★★★☆ Bryan Singer’s freshest contribution to the X-Men canon proves to be his most ambitious and complicated to date. X-Men: Days of Future Past...
★★★★☆ One might presume that filmmakers would slow down and smooth off the edges in their dotage, regardless of the material or the formal...
★★★☆☆ Melissa McCarthy is the leading lady cinema needs, but she’s not necessary the one it wants. Co-written by McCarthy and her director husband...