Author: Deborah Young

Grand Tour

 Another genre-bending fantasy from Portuguese director Miguel Gomes, ‘Grand Tour’ takes the viewer on a dreamy ride through colonial Asia in 1918, though the present day often pushes through the whimsical story of two characters chasing each other across Asia.  

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Parthenope

In the lush ‘Parthenope’, which he has called his first “feminine epic”, Paolo Sorrentino captures the passion and decadence, the misery, tragedy and baroque riches of his native Naples.

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The Apprentice

Ali Abbasi’s portrait of a young monster, ‘The Apprentice’, wisely chooses a humorous key in which to chronicle Donald Trump’s formative years as a businessman and how lawyer Roy Cohn helped his empire get its crooked start, though well-informed viewers will find nothing much new.

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Limonov: The Ballad

In ‘Limonov: The Ballad’, director Kirill Serebrennikov turns up the volume on his already explosive style (Petrov’s Flu), which is really the only way to recount the mad, violence-tinged rise of Russian poet and political extremist Eduard Limonov.

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Caught by the Tides

Re-shuffling footage from films he has shot over the last 23 years, Jia Zhang-ke places his awe-inspiring cinematic mastery on full display in ‘Caught by the Tides’, though its ravishing poetic beauty tends to obscure the story.

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