Film Reviews & More
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Promoting his latest work, a successful writer returns to his hometown and the site of his first love. Olivier Peyon’s sixth feature is a bittersweet bildungsroman told in reverse; a study of identity reconciled too late. In examining the reflexive, redemptive power of fiction, Lie With Me is a moving story of love lost to time.
★★★★☆ After an eleven-year hiatus, Rome-born director Emanuele Crialese returned to the cinema last year with the Venice premiere of this family drama. Now arriving on UK cinema screens, the 1970s-set L’immensità is a multilayered study of family life in disintegration.
★★☆☆☆ Trapped in an unhappy relationship and a life going nowhere fast, Cheyenne’s (Kristi Ray) discovery that she is pregnant gives her the kick that she needs to leave her partner, Alex (Hadyn Winston). American writer-director Erika Arlee’s debut feature showcases strong performances and nice visual flourishes, but A Song for Imogene struggles to find an emotional hook.
★★★★☆ Among the most popular and iconic toys in the world, since its 1959 inception, the Barbie doll has delighted children while embodying unrealistic beauty standards for women. Is Barbie a sexist stereotype or neo-feminist icon? Erstwhile indie director Greta Gerwig and co-writer Noah Baumbach asks, why not both?
★★★★☆ Christopher Nolan directs his first biopic, depicting the scientist who developed the atomic bombs that would devastate and the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and bring an end to the Second World War. The British director’s twelfth feature is a fascinating and accomplished cinematic object, but as a study of greatness, Oppenheimer’s subject is often obscured by its author’s auteurist preoccupations.
★★★★☆ Deep under the ice of the Bering Strait, a tactical exercise on a Russian submarine goes badly wrong. As the bodies of the doomed sub float to the surface, something sinister is hidden inside its hull. The first of a two-parter, Christopher McQuarrie helms the seventh episode of the era’s premier action series.
★★★★☆ The British-Moroccan director of Lynn + Lucy, Fyzal Boulifa, returns to screens with this deeply moving tale of a mother and son living on the margins of society. Sharing its name with a 1950 Joan Crawford film, The Damned Don’t Cry has thematic resonance with its namesake as a study of women’s vulnerability in a patriarchal society and the criminalising of marginalised lives.
★★★☆☆ It’s 1969 and time has finally caught up with Indiana Jones. When he’s not napping in a bourbon-induced fug, he’s boring his students to sleep, counting down the hours to retirement. It seems that the days of the once legendary archaeologist’s adventures are behind him, until the daughter of an old friend arrives to drag the old man into one final hurrah.
