A cold open introducing how a Transformer ends up on earth. An extended introduction to a nifty, somewhat nerdy girl into gizmos and gadgets.
19.05.2023 - 15:51 / variety.com
Guy Lodge Film Critic “Does everyone have to be a hero?” The question comes from thirtysomething art teacher Samet (Deni̇z Celi̇loğlu), burst out in frustration in the heat of an intense argument with his fellow educator and would-be girlfriend Nuray (Merve Di̇zdar), as they disagree over just how, or how much, any individual is obliged to contribute to society. It’s a familiar cry from a male protagonist in a film by Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan, even if it hasn’t ever been worded quite so directly: “About Dry Grasses,” his long, languid but slowly captivating ninth feature, is merely his latest work to examine man’s right, for better or worse, to be selfish, to be an anti-hero, to crave attention and isolation all at once, and to talk about it all night long.
That talky impulse in particular has become a signature of Ceylan’s filmmaking, to occasionally enervating effect. For all their abundance of lucidly expressed ideas and ideals, his last two films, “The Wild Pear Tree” and the Palme d’Or-winning “Winter Sleep,” couldn’t escape a sense of rhetorical ventriloquism, with the filmmaker placing his own paragraphs of philosophy in his characters’ mouths. But where those three-hour-plus films were occasionally essayistic, the similarly super-sized “About Dry Grasses” — a title that sounds almost self-parodically esoteric, a veritable taunt to Ceylan’s detractors — feels novelistic in a most nourishing way. Its longueurs unfurl the prickly desires and discontent of its characters, their circuitous intellectual arguments born of, and further driving, their tensely fraught relationships. At 197 minutes, the film might be overlong by many viewers’ standards, but it’s by no means under-filled: By chapters a bristling
A cold open introducing how a Transformer ends up on earth. An extended introduction to a nifty, somewhat nerdy girl into gizmos and gadgets.
The Flash,” a time travel movie about why it’s bad to retcon the past, but which exists entirely to convince the audience that retconning the past, present and (potentially) the future of the DC superhero franchise is a super cool thing to do.“Do as we say, not as we do,” I guess.“The Flash” stars Ezra Miller as Barry Allen, a costumed hero who can move at impossible speeds. When he’s not rescuing people from collapsing hospitals, Barry works as a crime scene technician and searches for evidence to exonerate his father, Henry (Ron Livingston), who was wrongfully convicted of killing Barry’s mother decades ago.Henry’s parole hearing is on the horizon, and despite the best efforts of Bruce Wayne (Ben Affleck) to clean up some old security footage that might have given Henry an alibi, it looks like there’s no hope for Barry’s dad.
The production needs of making the “Barbie” movie required so much pink paint that it led to a worldwide shortage.
Kaley Cuoco is opening up about if she and partner Tom Pelphrey will ever work together on a project.
When it comes to horror, Broadway typically cedes turf to Hollywood, the occasional Martin McDonough play notwithstanding. There have been giant apes, operatic phantoms, and a misguided vampire or two without providing so much as a single genuine tingle.
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attended the royal wedding of Crown Prince Hussein of Jordan and Rajwa Alseif on May 31, and . Kate wore a floaty, blush pink maxi dress to the Islamic ceremony, which was held in Amman, Jordan, per . A pattern of intricate embroidery decorated the gown's bodice and gave it texture, with additional embroidered detailing on the cuffs of her long and slightly puffed bell sleeves. She finished the Cinderella-esque look with her signature shiny brown waves parted to the side and statement drop earrings.
Death Becomes Her. Yet more often than not, we are left disappointed. Turns out, this is dissatisfaction isn’t limited to us non-Hollywood folks.
Matty Healy is shrugging off the backlash he received following his appearance on a podcast whose hosts made disparaging comments about Ice Spice. In a recent profile, The 1975 frontman addressed the controversy and said the criticism he received is essentially virtue signaling.Healy found himself embroiled in controversy over his February appearance on podcast, in which the 34-year-old singer revealed he had actually slid into Ice Spice's DMs. The 23-year-old rapper — who recently collaborated with Healy's rumored girlfriend, Taylor Swift, and performed onstage with her over the weekend at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey — never responded to Healy's DMs.The hosts, Friedland and Nick Mullen, then proceeded to crack jokes at Spice's expense (the rapper is of Nigerian and Dominican decent) by exaggerating Inuit accents.
The U.S. rights for Cannes Film Festival award winner “About Dry Grasses” have been acquired by Sideshow and Janus Films.“About Dry Grasses” follows Samet, a young art teacher who is finishing his fourth year of compulsory service in a remote village in Anatolia. After a turn of events he can hardly make sense of, he loses his hopes of escaping the grim life he seems to be stuck in.
It would be nice to think that desires are nothing more than preferences, springing organically from a fixed identity and unaffected by outside circumstances such as personal history and societal norms. The reality is, of course, much thornier, and trying to disentangle the many different factors influencing our tastes and longings can quickly cause a lot of suffering.
Former Manchester United striker Dwight Yorke has said that Jadon Sancho is on "borrowed time" at Old Trafford following another disappointing campaign at the club.
CANNES – Martin Scorsese isn’t the only 80-year-old filmmaker with a movie in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Marco Bellocchio, who was most recently at the festival in 2019 with “The Traitor,” returns at the spry young age of 83 with the ambitious tale of Edgardo Mortara, in “Kidnapped.” A movie that begins with a horrific act by the Catholic Church and then attempts to paint a portrait of one of the most infamous popes of relatively modern times, Pope Pius IX.
Guy Lodge Film Critic On the mean streets of Casablanca dartingly navigated in “Hounds,” all life is shown to be casually disposable; an actual human body, however, is another matter. Taking place over one sleepless night of mounting misfortune in the Moroccan metropolis, writer-director Kamal Lazraq’s first feature is a trim, unsparing crime tale that pits social desperation against a nagging spiritual conscience. Its gig-economy gangsters may follow almost any grisly orders for a quick buck, but are equally bound to Muslim creeds and customs, glumly shrugging off any disparity between these two authorities. Following an impoverished father-son duo as an ostensibly rote criminal errand goes bloodily awry, the film is briskly told and humidly atmospheric, though a little tonal variation wouldn’t have gone amiss amid an overriding air of hardscrabble, stomach-knotted discomfort. As its central crisis deepens and darkens, Lazraq’s script keeps teasing a gear-shift into mordant farce to which it never quite commits, leaving both the characters and the drama a bit stymied. Still, this is a notably punchy debut, both visceral and confidently cavalier in its depiction of everyday underworld brutality, with a sharp, streetlit sense of place — and just enough genre-film vigor to hook distributor interest after its Un Certain Regard premiere at Cannes.
Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic One of the grand paradoxes of Jean-Luc Godard is that he was a radical, an outlier, a filmmaker who guarded his purity and always looked askance at “the system,” yet because the nature of filmmaking is that it requires a lot of money, and is connected to fame, and produces images that can spread with iconic power, Godard was an outsider who was also an insider; a poet of cinema who made himself a celebrity; an artist who bridged the larger-than-life, old-school ethos of movies with the forbidding imperatives of the avant-garde. All of that contradiction is on full display, with a luscious kind of resonance, in “Godard par Godard,” an hour-long documentary, written by Frédéric Bonnaud and directed by Florence Platarets, that was presented at the Cannes Film Festival today as a tribute to Godard, eight months after his death on September 13, 2022. The documentary was shown along with Godard’s final film, the 20-minute-long “Trailer of the Film That Will Never Exist: ‘Phony Wars’.” All of which sounds like one of those Cannes–only special events, but au contraire: This is a program that was meant to be seen by the world at large, and with any luck it will be distributed that way. It’s an homage that invites us to look back, with fond fascination, on all the cinema Godard gave us, and on who he really was.
“Killers of the Flower Moon” is vast and vital in its scale, purpose and emotional scope, a Western-thriller and ensemble piece that is every bit a Scorsese crime picture as one can dare to imagine.The impeccably researched book by Grann (also the author of “The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon”) neither tells a customary frontier-era tale about this land’s indigenous people (which has been the more traditional avenue in cinema) nor features a stock white savior. Grann instead recounts a shockingly lesser known and shattering true-story from early 20th-century Oklahoma.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan has been a Cannes regular since his debut short, “Koza,” in 1995. An assured auteur from the very beginning, Ceylan made a name for Turkey on the festival circuit, and every year he brings a new title to the Croisette, critics and audiences alike already know what they’re in for.
When is time not on the side of any Cannes film premiere?
Nuri Bilge Ceylan loves snow. The depths of winter, people in thick coats, frozen taps, the sense that these long, bitterly cold seasons in mountain regions will never end. This is all working material for the Turkish master whose Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or in 2014. “What am I doing here?” is the regular moan from Samet (Deniz Celiloglu), the art teacher in the village school in About Dry Grasses.
To this Turkish critic, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is our Mike Leigh and Anton Chekhov in one, with multilayered characters of social and political complexities engaging through dialogue lines that feel both off-the-cuff and studiously planned in their lavish rhythms. Ceylan is also a master of luxuriously slow cinema with a recognizable visual style, haunting, minimalistic and sneakily riveting across textured, widescreen pastoral scenes and dimly-lit interiors that evolve with peerless patience.Written by Ceylan, Akin Aksu and Ebru Ceylan, his latest stunner “About Dry Grasses”—Ceylan’s best feature since “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”—flutters with all these pictorial qualities and emotional dispositions.