Film Review: ‘Hit So Hard’
★★★☆☆ It’s hardly surprising that anyone performing alongside Courtney Love for the best part of a decade should become accustomed to taking a back-seat...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ It’s hardly surprising that anyone performing alongside Courtney Love for the best part of a decade should become accustomed to taking a back-seat...
★★★★☆ American documentary filmmaker Chris Smith’s The Pool has been sitting on the shelf for over five years now, having won a Special Jury...
★★★★☆ The adjectives ‘tragic’, ‘powerful’ and ‘heart-breaking’ don’t really do justice to Jesse Vile’s Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet (2012), a documentary about the...
★★★★★ After a five year hiatus (following 2007’s oily Oscar winner There Will Be Blood), idolised American filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson returns this year...
★★★★★ Rewarding renowned Austrian director Michael Haneke with his second Palme d’Or within three years, Amour (2012) is arguably the auteur’s magnum opus –...
★★★★★ Eight-year-old Satsuki comes running in from the garden. “Mei says she saw a Totoro!” she tells her father. “You don’t believe me,” grumbles...
★★★★☆ Marking its 10th anniversary with a special Blu-ray rerelease, French director Nicolas Philibert’s award-winning Être et Avoir (To Be and to Have, 2002)...
★★★☆☆ Cannily released by arthouse distributors Artificial Eye in the same week as the Austrian auteur’s 2012 Palme d’Or winner Amour, Michael Haneke’s made...