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Cannes 2018: Ash Is Purest White review
★★★☆☆ Returning to Cannes for a fifth time, leading Chinese auteur Jia Zhangke presents his new film Ash Is Purest White, a story of love, sacrifice and betrayal spanning seventeen years of contemporary Chinese history. From as early as Platform, Jia has been linking the trajectories of his characters’ lives with the rapidly changing scenery…
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Film Review: Arctic
★★★☆☆ With Arctic, Brazilian director Joe Penna’s debut feature offers audiences a conventional survival thriller of one man pitted against nature, which still manages to deliver the occasional moment of raw tension. Mads Mikkelsen stars as Overgård, a Danish explorer who is forced to crash-land his aircraft in the middle of the arctic tundra. He…
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Film Review: Border
★★★★☆ Ali Abbasi’s sophomore feature Border is a folkloric movie on monstrous love and what it means to be human. Not so much Beauty and the Beast as Beast and the Beast, Border is one of those films that almost from the first shot makes you feel you are in safe hands even as you go…
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Film Review: Sorry Angel
★★★☆☆ French writer and director Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel, a drama of gay love in early-nineties Paris, is a meandering, novelistic piece that manages to be perfectly fine without ever really being great. The new film from Honoré – miserably titled Sorry Angel in English – begins with a startling credits sequence: a series of…
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Cannes 2018: Cold War review
★★★★★ Oscar-winning Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida, My Summer of Love) enters the front-running for the Cannes Palme d’Or with his new film Cold War, a beautifully composed tone poem to doomed love in Cold War Europe. Less is most definitely more in Cold War. Using the same academy ratio and frosty black and white…
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Film Review: That Good Night
★★★☆☆ There is the uncanny sense of art imitating life in Eric Styles’ poignant, end of life drama, featuring John Hurt’s swansong. That Good Night is about a man dealing with his impending death and Hurt was himself terminally ill when the film was shot. Ralph Maitland (Hurt), an egotistical screenwriter in his seventies, enjoys…
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Film Review: Entebbe
★★★☆☆ A tense thriller inspired by true events, Entebbe explores one of the most daring hostage rescue missions ever attempted, and by combining vivid historical details with suspense, it is a powerful depiction of an international crisis that shook the world. Set in the summer of 1976, an Air France jet travelling from Tel Aviv…
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Cannes 2018: Yomeddine review
★★★★☆ Leprosy, poverty and a story of social exclusion are the unlikely ingredients for the deeply engaging and often funny road movie Yomeddine, which entered the competition for the Palme d’Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival earlier today. Beshay (Rady Gamal) is a man who has recovered from leprosy but still bears the horrible…
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Cannes 2018: Rafiki review
★★★☆☆ The Kenyan government had already banned Wanuri Kahiu’s second feature, Rafiki, before it even premiered in Cannes. Telling the story of a pair of young women who fall in love only to be ostracised by their local community, the government feared it would “promote lesbianism” which remains illegal in Kenya. All of which has…
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Film Review: Leto
★★★☆☆ Russian director Kirill Serebrennikov’s Palme d’Or-nominated musical Leto is set among key figures dominating the early 1980s rock club scene in St. Petersburg. Initially fun and lively, it runs out of puff way before the end. “Soviet musicians must find all that is good in humanity,” the jobsworth committee chairperson of the local rock…
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