Cannes Review: ‘Happy End’ is a Restrained Amalgamation of Michael Haneke’s Oeuvre
Happy End is a perplexing title for a movie by Michael Haneke, a filmmaker not exactly known for his irony whose endings have ranged from the death of all the c...
Giovanni Marchini Camia
Cannes Review: ‘Okja’ is an Intelligent, Ambitious Blockbuster
A dystopian story about a genetically engineered beast with overt anti-capitalist connotations, Bong Joon-ho’s Okja represents a synthesis and an upgrade – in s...
Cannes Review: ‘Loveless’ is Beautifully Lensed, But Dramatically Futile
A shot late in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless encapsulates both the film’s overarching message and its author’s bludgeoning directorial approach. One of the prot...
Cannes Review: ‘Ismael’s Ghosts’ is a Disorienting, Exhilarating Drama
Pasolini included an “essential bibliography” in the opening credits of Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, proffering five philosophical titles by the likes of Rol...
[Cannes Review] Dog Eat Dog
Paul Schrader might want to consider expanding his thematic scope a little. Decade after decade, film after film, regardless of whether he’s been writing script...
[Cannes Review] Graduation
Considering the heights he’s reached in the past, Graduation constitutes a disappointing step backwards for erstwhile Romanian New Wave front-runner Cristian Mu...
[Cannes Review] The Salesman
Excessively schematic plotting is a recurring weakness of writer-director Asghar Farhadi’s work. Films like About Elly and The Past suffered from contrived narr...
[Cannes Review] Elle
It takes all of zero seconds for the first rape to occur in Paul Verhoeven’s Elle. The film opens on a black screen and to the sounds of breaking glass and stif...
[Cannes Review] Risk
Laura Poitras’ greatest strength as a documentarian is winning the trust of high-profile individuals and getting them to appear in front of her camera. In her r...
[Cannes Review] The Neon Demon
The problem in trying to critically assess Nicolas Winding Refn’s putrid atrocity of a film The Neon Demon is that regardless how much outrage is thrown at it, ...
