Film Reviews & More
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ British director Andrea Arnold follows up 2016’s American Honey and a sojourn in television with her first documentary, Cow. A near-wordless study of dairy cow Luma’s life and shot from a bovine-eye view, Cow resists the urge to anthropomorphise Luma while eliciting deep empathy for this non-human animal.
★★★★☆ Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the acclaimed director of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, makes his return to UK screens this week – a full six years after his last feature – with the Tilda Swinton-starring Memoria.
★★★★★ Paul Thomas Anderson returns to the director’s chair with Licorice Pizza, a joyous, hazy and nostalgia-inflected romantic drama set in California’s San Fernando Valley of the 1970s, featuring knockout debut performances from Alana Haim and Cooper Hoffman.
★★★★☆ No good deed goes unpunished, and such is the case for Rahim (Amir Jadidi), the protagonist of Asghar Farhadi’s A Hero. Imprisoned for debt, he is on two-day leave when he meets up with his girlfriend Farkhondeh (Sahar Goldust) who might just have the answer to his problems.
★★★★☆ With A Hero, Asghar Farhadi is back in his cinematic wheelhouse, dissecting the emotional cost of social expectations, delivering a tightly-wound drama of debt, obligation and the difficult question of what one person’s reputation is really worth.
Few movie franchises have ever been as successful as Star Wars. Over its lifespan, it has reportedly generated worldwide box office revenue of more than $10 billion.
With a number of projects delayed due to the pandemic, 2022 looks set to be another bumper year for established directors and emerging talents alike. Here are just a handful of films we’re desperate to watch (or, in some cases, rewatch) in the new year.
★★★★☆ Titane may only be her second feature, but French director Julia Ducournau has already asserted herself as among the strangest and most exciting filmmakers working in genre cinema. Her follow up to 2016’s Raw exceeds even that film in its unhinged capacity to disturb and enthral. In short, Titane is a triumph.
