DVD Review: ‘Polish Cinema Classics Vol.III’
★★★★☆ “Polish films are… boring…” claims Engineer Mamon in Marek Piwowski’s The Cruise (1970), widely considered the country’s original ‘cult’ film. A tongue-in-cheek microcosm...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ “Polish films are… boring…” claims Engineer Mamon in Marek Piwowski’s The Cruise (1970), widely considered the country’s original ‘cult’ film. A tongue-in-cheek microcosm...
★★★★☆ In LCD Soundsystem’s Losing My Edge, James Murphy charts the history of alternative music and places himself at every key scene along the...
★★★★☆ There are a number of key scenes in Columbian director Franco Lolli’s superb Gente de Bien (2014) – a playful title that means...
★★★★★ Signing a contract with a distributor rather than a studio might appear to be a very modern course of action for a star...
★★★★★ It has been sixty years since the release of Andrzej Wajda’s first film, Generation (1955), and in that time he has directed over...
★★★★☆ Novelist turned filmmaker Tadeusz Konwicki excelled at crafting an atmosphere of the otherworldly on the screen. Though 1965’s Jump may be more widely...
★★★★☆ There’s a moment of cinematic perfection around forty minutes into Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Austeria (1981). It’s an instant of the kind of visual poetry...
★★★★★ In 1956 there was a seismic political shift in Poland known variously as the Polish Thaw or Polish October. The Stalinist period ended...