Film Reviews & More
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Julia (It Follows’ Maika Monroe) has moved with husband Francis (Karl Glusman) from New York City for a new marketing job in Bucharest. Spending her days alone and struggling with the language barrier, Julia starts to feel that she is being spied on from the apartment opposite theirs.
★★★☆☆ Director Zach Cregger’s third feature is a tight, claustrophobic horror that starts strongly but descends into schlock and regrettable cliché in its final third. With surprises, compelling performances and strong visuals across the board, Barbarian warrants recommendation but with serious caveats.
★★★★★ If there was one criticism of Ruben Östlund’s The Square, it’s that his satire wasn’t so much shooting fish in a barrel as nuking a pod of whales in a glass of water. His new film, Triangle of Sadness, begins with a series of riffs on how vacuous the high fashion world is.
★★★★☆ Bros, a ground-breaking new romantic comedy, is the first Hollywood studio-backed picture to feature gay leads playing gay characters, with the supporting cast coming almost entirely from the LGBTQ community. It’s an important moment for representation on screen and surprisingly political in nature.
Set to be the ninth film in the Rocky franchise and the third of the legacy series, Creed III has received an all-revealing new trailer, which includes a release date of 3 March 2023. In the trailer, we learn about how the story advances to present us with a very different Adonis Creed to the one we left in Creed II, as well as his next opponent.
From jump scares to macabre costumes and eerie soundtracks, horror films are perfect for the Halloween season. This is the reason why audiences are eagerly on the lookout for good horror films when October comes around. Here, we’ll discuss some of the top retro horror films that you can watch with friends and family members this season.
★★★★☆ Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s new film Decision to Leave is a cinematic psychopath test. Park Hae-il plays Hae-joon a police detective who doesn’t have enough murders to solve in Busan. His wife (Lee Jung-hyun) works in Ipo, a misty seaside town. With his partner (Go Kyung-pyo), Hae-joon finally gets given what looks like an interesting case.
★★★★☆ You Won’t Be Alone is the fiercely poet debut of Macedonian-Australian Goran Stolevski. Set in the land of his birth, North Macedonia, at some point in the 19th century, the film follows the unusual and sometimes fraught life of a shape-shifting witch played by various actors over the years.
