Film Review: ‘Zaytoun’
★★☆☆☆ Stephen Dorff stars – somewhat bizarrely – as an Israeli fighter pilot who through an unfortunate mechanical malfunction finds himself stranded in Beirut...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★☆☆☆ Stephen Dorff stars – somewhat bizarrely – as an Israeli fighter pilot who through an unfortunate mechanical malfunction finds himself stranded in Beirut...
★★☆☆☆ Much like Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (2012) is another Booker prize-winning novel that has been dubbed unfilmable....
★★★★☆ Following its world premiere at this year’s Sundance and substantial positive feedback after its Film4 FrightFest outing, Jon Wright’s slick and entertaining Irish...
★★☆☆☆ Andy Fickman is one of those filmmakers who seems to have built a career for himself churning out mediocre movies every year or...
★★★★☆ Danny Huston taking the lead role in a Bernard Rose adaptation of a Leo Tolstoy novel has become something of a familiarity, following...
★★☆☆☆ Steven Spielberg’s sprawling historical biopic Lincoln (2012), starring Daniel Day-Lewis in the title role, gained near universal praise State-side for its depiction of...
★★★☆☆ In 1994, three teenage boys were jailed for the murder of three children in West Memphis, Arkansas. After the hysteria of the initial...
★★★★★ Over four years in the making and painstakingly crafted by a team of three thousand creatives, the grandeur and scale of Oscar-winning director...