Kurzel takes his cues from the text, but he expresses his ideas about the text through images and sounds — the whistling wind, the clashing swords, and the ghostly hooded figures — rather than through the dialogue. The verse, in Kurzel’s hands, is barely even identifiable as poetry. But what is Shakespeare without the unforgettable language?
Film Reviews
Here you will find every film review we've written. These include: festival films, new releases, and older films.
Theeb is a stunning adventure story
Jordan’s 2015 Oscar Submission is a compelling, World War I story about a wily boy and his brother.
Review: Songs My Brothers Taught Me
Chloë Zhao’s directorial debut “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” is a quiet, sensitive indigenous coming-of-age story set as high school graduation nears on the Pine Ridge Reserve.
Spectre Review: Mendes pulls from Shakespeare
How Sam Mendes borrowed from his King Lear production at the National Theatre when making his second James Bond film, Spectre.
This Changes Everything doesn’t preach on climate change
Avi Lewis’ documentary This Changes Everything looks at the narrative for civilization that allowed climate change to happen. Without preaching, the film takes a look at grassroots movements that are helping to mitigate climate change.
Nasty Baby is a half-baked bougie satire
The film gleefully sends up bourgeois attitudes as ridiculous before suggesting they’re harmful. Yet we’re not meant to dislike the characters causing harm. It’s an interesting premise that hasn’t been fully fleshed out. Likewise, Silva’s choice to shoot the film handheld, in all its clumsiness, prevents the film from ever being a beautiful work of art. It’s an aesthetic designed to be cheap and adaptable to an improvised script, but it doesn’t allow for much formal rigour. It lulls us into a kind of complacency, setting up a story of middle-class liberalism, before subverting the genre’s expectations.