Film Review: ‘The Fighter’
★★★☆☆ A lot can happen in six years. Just six years ago, the planet was still iPhone free, Tony Blair was ruling the country...
★★☆☆☆ “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 lot can happen in six years. Just six years ago, the planet was still iPhone free, Tony Blair was ruling the country...
I know what most of the discerning film connoisseurs amongst you are thinking. Surely he doesn’t mean the appalling 1988 Tom Cruise film, and...
BAFTA and the ICA present a unique series of masterclasses led by award-winning practitioners from the worlds of film, television and video games at...
From start to finish, Bryan Forbes’ Deadfall (1968) glimmers with the gloss of a 1960’s classic heist thriller, very much in the vein of Ocean’s...
★☆☆☆☆ Not to be confused with Woody Allen’s 1982 feature A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy, A Swedish Midsummer Sex Comedy, or Äntligen midsommar! (2009)...
Filmed in postwar Germany in much the same way as a number of Italian Neorealist efforts, Michael Anatole Litvak’s Decision Before Dawn (1951) concerns the moral...
Andrew Marton’s The Thin Red Line (1964), an adaptation of James Jones’ novel (later adapted by Terrence Malick), is a psychological study of men...
★☆☆☆☆ Picture the scene: you’re walking through your local HMV (other retailers are available) and you’re looking to buy a movie because you’ve got...