John Bleasdale
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Film Review: Loro
★☆☆☆☆ Paolo Sorrentino announced himself on the international stage with the sterling Il Divo, a study of Italy’s perennial mover and fixer Giulio Andreotti and in the process an evisceration of the Italian political class, with a style that oscillated between Quentin Tarantino and Federico Fellini. Since then Sorrentino’s career has been fireworks and squibs…
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Film Review: Last Breath
★★★☆☆ Saturation diving in the North Sea is a world of experience that most of us know nothing about. One of the divers in Alex Parkinson and Richard da Costa’s new film Last Breath, in UK cinemas this week, describes as going to space but underwater. The divers have to enter specially pressurised capsules in…
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Film Review: Sharkwater Extinction
★★★★☆ The late Rob Stewart’s activist documentary Sharkwater Extinction is an urgent and moving plea for action against the illegal trade in shark fins and more generally for the conservation of marine life in our rapidly dirtier and emptier oceans. Sharkwater Extinction literally begins lost at sea. Diver, activist and filmmaker Rob Stewart recalls how…
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Film Review: Benjamin
★★★☆☆ Released in UK cinemas this week, British actor and comedian Simon Amstell’s debut film Benjamin is a charming metropolitan rom-com which is ultimately too lightweight to escape the gravity of its influences. It’s a daring move to make the main character of your debut movie a writer-director nipple-deep in the media landscape. Colin Morgan…
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Film Review: The Hole in the Ground
★★★☆☆ A young woman retreats to the Irish countryside with her son in Lee Cronin’s debut feature The Hole in the Ground. Sarah O’Neill (Seána Kerslake) is the literally bruised young woman fleeing an abusive relationship into the depths of the Irish woods. In a large farmhouse full of creaking cellar doors and groaning walls,…
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Film Review: The Workshop
★★★☆☆ Alexei Sayle once cautioned that you should never enter a workshop that doesn’t have a vice in it. French writer-director Laurent Cantet’s new film The Workshop soon reveals that though it’s not that kind of workshop, he is still able to turn the screws. It’s summer in the small coastal French town of La…
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Venice 2018: Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma wins Golden Lion
The winner of last year’s Golden Lion for The Shape of Water, Guillermo Del Toro joked “Let me see if I can pronounce this,” before announcing to very few peoples’ surprise that Alfonso Cuarón had won Venice’s top prize for his sumptuous memoir of childhood, Roma. In his speech, he pointed out the serendipity that…
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Film Review: The Nightingale
★★★☆☆ The lone woman in competition last year at the Venice Film Festival, Jennifer Kent brings her Tasmanian gothic tale The Nightingale, a violent and disturbing revenger tragedy of stark pessimism, to UK cinemas this week. “Welcome to the world, boy,” Clare (Aisling Franciosi) tells Billy (Baykali Ganambarr). “Full of misery from top to bottom.”…
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Film Review: 22 July
★★★☆☆ British director Paul Greengrass’ Netflix-backed 22 July recreates the terrorist attacks on the island of Utøya and Oslo in 2011, and tracks how Norway dealt with the aftermath of Anders Breivik’s marauding assault. In the afternoon of the 22 July 2011, a bomb went off in central Oslo near government buildings. The bomber was…
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Film Review: Sunset
★★★☆☆ Hungarian director László Nemes’ long-awaited follow-up to his Oscar-winning Son of Saul, Sunset thrusts us into a Mitteleuropean heart of darkness and a fever dream which ultimately lacks substance. “I was looking for a job and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now,” sang Morrissey. And the same could be…
