Film Review: American Made
★★★☆☆ Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman and megastar Tom Cruise collaborate for the second time on American Made, a rogue’s tale set in...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ Edge of Tomorrow director Doug Liman and megastar Tom Cruise collaborate for the second time on American Made, a rogue’s tale set in...
★★★★☆ It’s always instructive to compare a director’s latest film with their previous efforts, and this is certainly the case with Laura Poitras’ Risk....
★★★★☆ An Asian gentleman boisterously raising a glass to “this damn country, which we love and hate” perfectly encapsulates the conflicted nature of the...
★★★★☆ William Golding’s tale of public schoolboys stranded on a desert island is an iconic depiction of fundamental savagery. More than fifty years on,...
★★★★★ Often relegated to the shadow of his friend and mentor Jean Renoir, and never attributed with the same influence as Truffaut, Godard and...
★★★★☆ While Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu are busy across the border in Hollywood, Amat Escalante has taken up the...
★★★★☆ Quest director Jonathan Olshefski spent nine years befriending and filming the Raineys, beginning at the dawn of the Obama presidency, and ending with...
★★☆☆☆ The defining quality of poetry is that much of the page is blank. This is the ‘white space’ literary critic Christopher Ricks claimed...