DVD Review: ‘Borgia – Complete Season One’
★★★★☆ Borgia (2011) is a grand costume drama charting the torrid loves and tangled political lives of the infamous, self-promoting 15th century Italian dynasty....
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Borgia (2011) is a grand costume drama charting the torrid loves and tangled political lives of the infamous, self-promoting 15th century Italian dynasty....
★★★☆☆ Billed as a free interpretation of Goethe’s original play, Alexander Sokurov’s Faust (2011) sees the Russian auteur returning to his proclivity for challenging...
★★★★☆ Icíar Bollaín’s 2010 film-within-a-film Even the Rain is a political drama set during the Bolivian Water Wars of 2000. A labour of love,...
★★★☆☆ More an exercise in reinforcing a legend rather than unearthing its roots, Kevin Macdonald’s reggae documentary Marley (2012) is an interesting, yet ultimately...
★★★☆☆ Following a series of impressive supporting turns, French actress Sandrine Kiberlain is given centre stage in Yves Caumon’s The Bird (L’oiseau, 2011), a...
★★☆☆☆ Nigel Cole’s latest comic offering draws together a jolly of British comedians in The Wedding Video (2012), a light-hearted prolonged snub at the...
★★★★☆ In very much the same vein as Ben Wheatley’s Kill List (2011), writer/director Sean Hogan’s The Devil’s Business (2011) will scare you by inference...
★★★☆☆ Canadian actress/director Sarah Polley’s Take This Waltz (2011) is a frustrating, yet undeniably beguiling observation of love and infatuation told through a staunchly...