Film Review: The Olive Tree
★★☆☆☆ Icíar Bollaín’s The Olive Tree is a familial drama whose meandering tone and rather glib message mean that it never truly takes root....
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★☆☆☆ Icíar Bollaín’s The Olive Tree is a familial drama whose meandering tone and rather glib message mean that it never truly takes root....
★★★★☆ Relatively cheap and quick to shoot, horror is often the favoured genre of young directors. Luminaries like Sam Raimi and Steven Spielberg both...
★★★★☆ In his 2012 film A Separation, Asghar Farhadi created a gripping and deeply affecting study of how a family unit can disintegrate within...
★★★☆☆ It’s possible that there’s more to life than meets the eye; that we survive physical death and live on in a secondary dimension....
★★★★☆ Heroism can take on many forms. A professional athlete, at the peak of his career, may block a punt in the opening seconds...
★★★★☆ It’s been nearly three decades since the release of Disney’s first attempt at Beauty and the Beast and now, like Cinderella and The...
★★★☆☆ If the ongoing franchise juggernaut of J.K. Rowling’s magical fantasy is anything to go by, the world just can’t get enough of wizards....
★★★☆☆ If Hollywood has taught us anything it’s never to organise a family dinner. From August, Osage County to Xavier Dolan’s It’s Only the...