DVD Review: ‘The Leos Carax Collection’
★★★★☆ The French title of Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986) – released in the UK as The Night is Young, although the closest translation...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ The French title of Leos Carax’s Mauvais Sang (1986) – released in the UK as The Night is Young, although the closest translation...
★★★★★ We live in a digital age, yet despite the onslaught of the constant increasing presence of technology in our lives, rarely do we...
Exhibition (2013), the latest film from British auteur Joanna Hogg, is a mysterious work that poses provocative questions about how we relate to the...
★★★★★ A man (H) and a woman (D) live together in a modernist house in London designed by the architect James Melvin in director...
★★★★☆ There could be an argument for three being the most cinematic of numbers. Some would argue two, others one, but it surely has...
★★★☆☆ You have to hand it to Hollywood polymath James Franco. He certainly seems unfazed when it comes to the challenges he sets himself....
★★☆☆☆ Film director Johannes (Jakob Cedergren) returns home from a trip to be told that his wife Signe (Helle Fagralid) has killed their infant...
★★★★☆ The latest from Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (the same team who brought us last year’s Leviathan), Manakamana (2013) is another non-narrative, observational...