Blu-ray Review: ‘Re-Animator’
★★★★☆ A perfect antidote to the weighty, sociopolitically savvy undead allegories of George A. Romero, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) receives a welcome Blu-ray release...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ A perfect antidote to the weighty, sociopolitically savvy undead allegories of George A. Romero, Stuart Gordon’s Re-Animator (1985) receives a welcome Blu-ray release...
★★★★☆ For Crazy Heart (2009), director Scott Cooper immersed himself the Americana of the country music scene, and with the aide of T Bone...
★★☆☆☆ There’s more than a hint of hagiography in Joshua Michael Stern’s tick-box biopic of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, out now in the UK...
★★☆☆☆ We may now be experiencing the zenith of a vaunted McConnaisance, but even Matthew McConaughey’s Oscar-winning physical transformation can’t distract from the cynical...
★★★☆☆ An investigation into the doping scandal that pushed American cyclist Lance Armstrong back into the media spotlight for all the wrong reasons, Alex...
★★☆☆☆ The latest offering to emerge from Bristol’s iFeatures micro-budget funding scheme, which also saw Polish-born director Katarzyna Klimkiewicz’s impressive Flying Blind (2012) secure...
Since it first premièred at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, Alain Guiraudie’s Stranger by the Lake (L’inconnu du lac) has gone on to garner...
★★★★☆ “50% of Russia’s budget comes from the oil and gas industry,” asserts the quote – attributed to Vladimir Putin – that opens Russian...