John Bleasdale

★★★★☆ Tiago Guedes’ latest offering The Domain dissects a wealthy Portuguese family in the second half of the 20th century as a libertarian young patriarch struggles with duty, family, politics and his own personal destructive freedom.

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★★★☆☆ “All hail the king,” proclaim the posters dotted around the Venice Lido. The story of Henry V gets a revisionist, Netflix-backed interpretation from Animal Kingdom director David Michôd as a floppy-haired Timothée Chalamet goes boldly into the breach once more in Venice out-of-competition offering The King.

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★★★☆☆ Do you remember when Steven Soderbergh retired from filmmaking? That was approximately five films and two television series ago. There’s a looseness to his new Netflix-bound Panama Papers takedown The Laundromat that, for both better or worse, smacks of an OAP not giving a tinker’s cuss.

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★★★☆☆ Ema (Mariana Di Girólamo) is a young dancer with a Daenerys Targaryen bleach job and a love of Reggaeton. She’s also a bit of a pyromaniac. The first shot we see in Pablo Larraín’s new film Ema is of a stoplight burning, set on fire by Ema with her flamethrower.

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★★★☆☆ The Dreyfus Affair is chronicled as a turn of the century espionage thriller worthy of le Carré in Roman Polanski’s An Officer and a Spy. There was a good chance that his film could have been withdrawn after the jury head Lucrecia Martel shared her dissatisfaction at the film being included in the competition.

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As the 76th edition of Venice commenced this week, the oldest film festival in the world has entered some choppy waters. First of all, there was a Hollywood Reporter article that slammed Venice as the “Fuck you” festival, essentially ignoring the #MeToo movement and the calls for gender representation which even Cannes has been slowly…

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