FrightFest 2011: ‘Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark’ review
★★★☆☆ Apparently, Guillermo del Toro has been itching to make this one for years. In his youth, John Newland’s 1973 haunted house tale became...
★★☆☆☆ “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.
★★★☆☆ Apparently, Guillermo del Toro has been itching to make this one for years. In his youth, John Newland’s 1973 haunted house tale became...
★★★★☆ Armenian director Sergi Paradjanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates (1968), starring Sofiko Chiaureli, is not what you would call a traditionally entertaining film. A...
★★★★☆ In Latin, the word rabies translates literally as ‘madness’; something the pretty girls and boys visiting this deserted woodland could never have imagined....
★★☆☆☆ In the run-up to its Saturday screening at this year’s Film4 FrightFest, I can exclusively reveal that Norwegian mockumentary Troll Hunter (2010) revolves...
★★★★★ From acclaimed director Pedro Almoldóvar, and starring Antonio Banderas and upcoming talent Elena Anaya comes The Skin I Live In (2011),an incredibly beautiful...
★★★★★ Film critics can be such heartless bastards at times. I’ve read many assassinations of One Day (2011) in the last 24-hours, and although...
Visiting the Prince Charles Cinema, just off London’s Leicester Square, is a little like being transported into a cinematic time machine. It’s not a...
To celebrate the release today of Marcus Nispel’s remake of the classic Arnold Schwarzenegger action adventure Conan the Barbarian (2011), we caught up with...