Film Review: ‘Mr. Holmes’
★★★☆☆ Benedict Cumberbatch need not worry his boots are being filled. Ian McKellen’s take on Sherlock Holmes is more Sunday teatime viewing than prime-time...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ Benedict Cumberbatch need not worry his boots are being filled. Ian McKellen’s take on Sherlock Holmes is more Sunday teatime viewing than prime-time...
★★★☆☆ Looking at the many critical responses to director Doug Ellin’s swiftly maligned Entourage (2015), it’s easy to forget that the series was well-received...
★★☆☆☆ It’s the film David O. Russell walked away from and whose premise the Obama administration made pathetically redundant. After years in limbo, audiences...
★★★★☆ Fantasy becomes near unbelievable reality in Sundance hit The Stanford Prison Experiment (2015), director Kyle Patrick Alvarez’s astonishing third feature film which sees...
★★★☆☆ Every family is unique and each one has its own personal stories to tell. Scottish-born artist and filmmaker Karen Guthrie puts her own...
The 69th Edinburgh International Film Festival (17-28 June) gets underway this week with the World Première of actor Robert Carlyle’s directorial debut, The Legend...
★★★★★ Damián Szifrón’s ribald anthology feature Wild Tales (2014) has managed a Herculean feat. As an anthology film it’s pretty much perfect. Not a...
★★★★☆ According to an octogenarian emcee as she lays down some beats on a neon-drenched intersection of sprawling graffiti-laden alleyways, Sion Sono’s Tokyo Tribe...