DVD Review: ‘Romance’
★★★★☆ While Catherine Breillat’s excellent latest film The Abuse of Weakness (2013) continues to languish in UK distribution limbo, it’s a great pleasure to...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ While Catherine Breillat’s excellent latest film The Abuse of Weakness (2013) continues to languish in UK distribution limbo, it’s a great pleasure to...
★★★☆☆ Diego Quemada-Díez’s debut film The Golden Dream (2013) so impressed at Cannes in 2013 that it received a special award and fulsome praise...
★★★☆☆ Vivian Maier was a ghost, a recluse, an enigma, a mystery, and quite possibly one of the greatest street photographers of the 20th...
★★★☆☆ When six world renowned filmmakers – including Robert Redford and the late Austrian director Michael Glawogger – were asked to make short films...
★★★★★ Lars von Trier’s masterpiece is almost twenty. Starring Emily Watson, in what surely ranks as one of the most remarkable big screen debuts,...
★★☆☆☆ Has modern commercial pop stripped music of its capacity to inspire individuality or can, given the appropriate ingredients, a song tap into the...
★★★☆☆ Saturday Night Live graduates Kristen Wiig and Bill Hader reunite as an eccentric brother-sister double act in Craig Johnson’s second feature; The Skeleton...
★★★☆☆ Dylan Thomas’ first jaunt to America is explored in Andy Goddard’s understated but likable Set Fire to the Stars (2014). The centenary of...