Film Review: The Painted Bird
★★★★☆ Premiering in competition at last year’s Venice Film Festival, Václav Marhoul’s adaptation of Jerzy Kosińsk’s 1965 novel The Painted Bird is a gruelling...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Premiering in competition at last year’s Venice Film Festival, Václav Marhoul’s adaptation of Jerzy Kosińsk’s 1965 novel The Painted Bird is a gruelling...
★★★★★ It’s a quarter of a century since La Haine‘s original release, its win for Best Director at the 1995 Cannes Film Festival and its stunning...
★★★★☆ When one door closes in I’m Thinking of Ending Things, some are locked, others left ajar and one which opens memories long buried...
★★☆☆☆ Three figures stalk through a forest – a woman with long, raven-black hair (Katarina Jakobson), a giant, bearded brute carrying a dead dog...
★★★★☆ Multi-award-winning Brazilian drama Sócrates tells the troubled story of a bereaved gay teenager barely surviving in a São Paulo slum. Directed with quiet...
★★★★☆ The film that took the Jury Prize at last year’s Cannes shook French President Emmanuel Macron so strongly that he was moved to...
★★☆☆☆ Veteran scribe William Nicholson returns to the screen in his first feature directorial credit since 1997’s Firelight. Now on directing duties too, Nicholson...
★★★★☆ In her second feature as director, American actor-producer-filmmaker Amy Seimetz explores the existential ennui of inevitable doom in this chilling, strange horror. In...