Blu-ray Review: ‘Poe’s Black Cats’
★★★★☆ Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story The Black Cat has been adapted in almost every era of cinema, from Universal’s two classic offerings...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story The Black Cat has been adapted in almost every era of cinema, from Universal’s two classic offerings...
★★★☆☆ Standing in front of a mirror, a man repeats the phrase, “I have never tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs.” His intonation and inflection...
★☆☆☆☆ A prequel to J.M. Barrie’s beloved Peter Pan, Joe Wright’s Pan (2015) takes the audience back to the war-torn 1940s before young Peter...
★★★☆☆ There were few films at Cannes this year with as strange a central premise Yorgos Lanthimos’ first English language offering The Lobster (2015),...
★★★☆☆ “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by werewolf movies.” Okay, wrong Howl perhaps, but aside from An American Werewolf in...
★★★☆☆ French icon Catherine Deneuve graces our screens once again in Pierre Salvadori’s Dans la Cour (2014), a delicate Parisian tragicomedy about a community...
★★★☆☆ Adam Sandler’s still profitable career has been in decline in recent years with one critical admonishment after another. This downturn might just be...
★★★☆☆ As gorgeous to behold as Crimson Peak (2015) often is, Guillermo del Toro’s latest film has zero dramatic gravitas. It’s pop-up book Gothic,...