Film Review: Lion
★★★☆☆ Lion, the debut feature from Australian director Garth Davis, is the tale of a tiny needle in a very large haystack and perseverance...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ Lion, the debut feature from Australian director Garth Davis, is the tale of a tiny needle in a very large haystack and perseverance...
★★★★★ Does a picture really paint a thousand words? When something is written down, does that make it true? With an increasingly spellbinding command...
★★★★☆ Christine Chubbuck used to be a name you were most likely to come across on an internet listicle about the strangest things to...
★★★☆☆ Ralitza Petrova’s Locarno Golden Leopard winner Godless is the latest in an outpouring of punishing portraits of life in the New East. Rigidly...
★★★☆☆ Japanese director Rintaro’s anime feature Metropolis, adapted from Osamu Tezuka’s 1949 manga, is a spectacular if tonally incongruous reworking of Fritz Lang’s 1927...
★★★★★ In arguably his best screen performance, Cary Grant heads the terrific His Girl Friday, Howard Hawks’ classic 1940 comedy about fast-talking journalist Walter...
★★★★★ Robert Wiene’s expressionist masterpiece The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari is one of the most important films of the post-First World War era and...
★★★☆☆ Spanning thirty years, three continents and a myriad of lies and mistruths, the facts of the case in Karin Steinberger and Marcus Vetter’s...