#LFF 2017: Journey’s End review
★★★★☆ Opening in 1928, R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End depicted the tragic futility of the Great War through the metaphor of lost youth. British...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ With Luca Guadagnino’s terrific Challengers, the acclaimed director of Call Me By Your Name brings us the sub-genre we never knew we needed: the erotic tennis thriller.
★★☆☆☆ Directors Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett’s “Abigail” mashes up crime caper and monster movie, but fails to deliver fear or humor. Spoilery trailers and unoriginal characters overshadow promising elements, resulting in a dull, lifeless experience lacking creativity and wit.
★★☆☆☆ Maïwenn’s French period drama Jeanne du Barry is the perfect opening salvo for the 76th Cannes Film Festival. It is as glitzy and gaudy as the festival itself, with its vacuous politics drowned out by the thunderous sound of it slapping its own back.
★★★★☆ Opening in 1928, R.C. Sherriff’s play Journey’s End depicted the tragic futility of the Great War through the metaphor of lost youth. British...
★★★★☆ The League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson and Andy Nyman rework their Olivier-nominated Ghost Stories for the screen, delivering an insidiously spooky homage to Hammer...
★★★☆☆ Tennis drama Battle of the Sexes is a retelling of Billie Jean King’s famous titular match against Bobby Riggs in 1973. It’s also...
★★★★☆ The Reagan Show is timely on a number of levels. Using archive footage, news reports and White House TV, they manage to piece...
★★☆☆☆ Idris Elba and Kate Winslet star in The Mountain Between Us, an entertaining but predictable survival drama from Dutch-Palestinian director Hany Abu-Assad. With...
★★★★☆ Beginning as a routine meander into the woods in search of birds, The Ornithologist becomes an unsettling and subversive pilgrimage taking in the...
★★★☆☆ Based on journalist Jeannette Walls’ bestselling memoir, director Destin Daniel Cretton’s Short Term 12 follow-up The Glass Castle is a sensitive story of...
★★★★★ One of the most eagerly-awaited films of 2017, we run the critical Voight-Kampff test to find out if Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade...