Glasgow 2021: In the Shadows review
★★★★☆ An isolated, run-down coal mine, enclosed by high-sided valley walls, is the forbidding, dystopian setting of Erdem Tepegöz’s impressive third feature, In the...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★★☆ An isolated, run-down coal mine, enclosed by high-sided valley walls, is the forbidding, dystopian setting of Erdem Tepegöz’s impressive third feature, In the...
★★★★☆ Khalik Allah’s IWOW: I Walk on Water is an ambitious, bewildering stream of consciousness; visual, aural, even ethereal. A film that looks past...
Following successful outings for CPH:DOX and the BFI London Film Festival in 2020, and digital editions of Sundance and Rotterdam taking place since the...
★★★☆☆ More than four years after it premiered at the 2016 London Film Festival, British-Nigerian director Joseph A. Adesunloye’s feature debut finally sees the...
★★★★☆ French filmmaker Charlène Favier explores a sexually abusive relationship between a talented young skier and her predatory coach in Slalom. Directed with both...
★★★★☆ Musician and filmmaker Ben Hozie tends to make films about New York’s more bohemian personalities. From documentary shorts about painters who use their...
Perhaps better-known for his work fronting the New York art band BODEGA, Ben Hozie is also a director of stylistically-daring documentaries and independent films that centre around the unusual lives of artists and societal outcasts.
★★★☆☆ In a small rural town in the middle of acres and acres of soy fields, bodies keep turning up. The latest is the...