DVD Review: ‘Miss Bala’
★★★☆☆ A critical hit upon its BFI London Film Festival appearance last year (though predictably fairing less well at the UK box office), Gerardo...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ A critical hit upon its BFI London Film Festival appearance last year (though predictably fairing less well at the UK box office), Gerardo...
★★★☆☆ Finally finding its way onto DVD and Blu-ray thanks to the BFI’s Flipside label, Norman J. Warren’s 1967 erotic drama Her Private Hell...
★★★★☆ Those perplexed by grizzled mumbler Nick Nolte’s nomination in the Best Supporting Actor category at this year’s Academy Awards may well be among...
★★☆☆☆ As ham acting goes, Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011) is a big fat hog roast with a side order of crackling. Nicolas...
★★★★☆ Over a decade in the making, Position Among the Stars (2010) is the final instalment of Dutch director Leonard Retel Helmrich’s trilogy of...
★★★★☆ Paweł Pawlikowski’s The Woman in the Fifth (2011) – starring Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas – is stylishly shot, slickly directed and...
★★★★☆ We tend to identify our sense of a city with its architecture; Paris for its artful designs throwing back to the country’s rich...
★★★☆☆ The lavishly produced and stylish crime thriller Boca (2012) – directed by Brazilian filmmaker Flavio Frederico and based on the autobiography of Hiroito,...