The Square (2017)
★★★★☆
Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning The Square is a chilling satire on the pretensions of art and Sweden’s comfortable society.
★★★★☆
Ruben Östlund’s Palme d’Or-winning The Square is a chilling satire on the pretensions of art and Sweden’s comfortable society.
★★★★☆
You Were Never Really Here by Lynne Ramsay is a dark, disturbing odyssey into the mind of a brutal yet tender hitman.
★★★☆☆
Tarik Saleh’s The Nile Hilton Incident unravels a noir thriller against the political background of Egypt’s revolution in 2011.
★★★☆☆
Facing the humiliation of social exclusion after losing a loved one, Sebastián Lelio’s A Fantastic Woman is a heartbreaking portrait of loneliness.
★★★★☆
Christian Petzold’s fascinating present-day World War II film Transit is thematically and narratively dense, but there’s nothing dense in the way it goes about handling it.
★★★★☆
Her native rugged Yorkshire is the setting for Dark River, Clio Barnard’s follow-up to The Selfish Giant, a grim drama of a dysfunctional family and their failing farm.
★★★☆☆
Q’s Garbage unfurls like a beautiful scream of pain and rage against Indian society gone dystopianly wrong.
★★★☆☆
Alexey German Jr’s character study of a great Russian writer in Dovlatovencapsulates its time period superbly, but fails to go beyond that.
★★★☆☆
As mystifying as it is transfixing, Jagoda Szlec’s feature-length debut Tower. A Bright Day is an astute blend of dread and mundanity.
★★★★★
Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water is a fairy tale, a story of love, loss and friendship, and a magical cinematic joy.
★★★★★
Shown through a couple’s reactions to the disappearance of their son, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless (Nelyubov) is a crushing comment on a loveless society and its people.
★★☆☆☆
Journey’s End, director Sam Dibbs’ adaptation of R.C.Sherriff’s stage play, struggles to entrench itself in WWI.
★★★☆☆
A strong directorial debut by Peter Mackie Burns features an award-winning performance by Emily Beecham as the compelling central character in Daphne.
★★★☆☆
Alexander Payne’s Downsizing is a fantasy satire in microcosm on life, the universe and everything.