Film Review: ‘Pixels’
★★☆☆☆ Instead of delivering feel-good gamer nostalgia, Chris Columbus’ big budget spectacle indulges in the worst kind of self-congratulatory 1980s male egotism ad nauseam....
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★☆☆☆ Instead of delivering feel-good gamer nostalgia, Chris Columbus’ big budget spectacle indulges in the worst kind of self-congratulatory 1980s male egotism ad nauseam....
★★★★☆ Mistress America (2015) – the latest collaboration between on-screen and off-screen partners Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig – is an uproarious screwball comedy...
★★★☆☆ Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) helmer Guy Ritchie returns to the director’s chair with The Man from U.N.C.L.E., a stylish rework...
★★★☆☆ Isolation is the key material that paves the shadowy narrative alleyways of Brian Hill’s The Confessions of Thomas Quick (2015). At one stage...
★★★☆☆ The word ‘outlaw’ is one that conjures various associations. One definition describes a career criminal, but another a non-conformist; popular culture tends to...
★★☆☆☆ Run All Night (2015), the latest addition to the ongoing Neesploitation cycle, feels like a film which Warner Bros. fell madly in love with...
★★★★☆ Winner of three prizes in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar last year, Thomas Cailley’s debut feature Les Combattants is an expertly handled and brilliantly...
★★★★☆ A small farmstead is beset by a gang of ruthless mercenaries attempting to coerce the inhabitants from their land until a mysterious loner...