John Bleasdale
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Venice 2018: Vox Lux review
★★★★★ We’ve already had A Star Is Born here at Venice. Now, with Brady Corbet’s latest film Vox Lux, we have A Star Is Torn – a truly unique power-pop epic starring Natalie Portman as the mononymous singer Celeste, whose rise to fame is intertwined with other tragic trajectories. Corbet originally caught our attention with the…
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Venice 2018: Dragged Across Concrete review
★★☆☆☆ S. Craig Zahler falls between ever-widening stools with his brutal new crime drama Dragged Across Concrete, which might have been more representative of the viewing experience had it been called Dragged Slowly Across Concrete. Recently-released criminal Henry Johns (Tory Kittles) returns home to find his mother hooking to pay for drugs. Meanwhile two cops, Brett…
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Film Review: What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire?
★★★★★ For years, Roberto Minervini has been chronicling the lives of the poor, marginalised and the voiceless. From the neglected child in his fiction work Low Tide to the plight of the Louisiana homeless in The Other Side, Minervini looks hard and yet sympathetically at those caught on the shitty side of the American Dream.…
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Film Review: The Sisters Brothers
★★★★☆ French Palme d’Or winner Jacques Audiard’s The Sisters Brothers gallops into UK cinemas this week with John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix as two gunfighting brothers in a brilliant postmodern western of true wit. “Well, we fucked that up,” states Eli (Reilly) as he and his brother Charlie (Phoenix) walk away from a gunfight…
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Venice 2018: Suspiria review
★★★★☆ Call Me By Your Name director Luca Guadagnino doesn’t so much remake Dario Argento’s Suspiria as use the influential Italian horror movie as an incantation with which to weave his own brand of red-black magic. Berlin, 1977. The Wall is still up and members of the Red Army Faction are in jail. Bombs are…
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Film Review: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs
★★★★☆ The Coen brothers go West once more with their latest offering The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a Netflix-produced anthology of bizarre tales of the Wild West that are by turns hilarious, macabre and unexpectedly moving. “Out here in the West the distances are great and the scenery monotonous,” states cheery singing cowboy Buster Scruggs…
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Film Review: A Star Is Born
★★★☆☆ As the third remake, A Star Is Born could have been called A Star Is Born (Again), but Bradley Cooper’s soulful exploration of the depredations of fame is an effective melodrama boasting genuine star turns from himself and Lady Gaga. Cooper plays Jackson Maine, an alcoholic rock star with an okay singing voice and an…
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Film Review: The Other Side of the Wind
★★★★☆ We must be reaching Welles saturation point this year. Mark Cousins’ The Eyes of Orson Welles landed on the piles of Wellesaphilia, soon to be joined by Morgan Neville’s They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead. Restorations of all his major works are either accomplished or in the works. Now, an almost legendary project –…
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Film Review: Roma
★★★★☆ Mexican Academy Award-winning director Alfonso Cuarón returns to his childhood for inspiration with his meticulously beautiful Netflix offering Roma, an autobiographical black and white thank you letter full of warmth and love. Following his triumphant Gravity, which opened Venice back in 2013, Cuarón obviously felt as much need to come down to Earth as Sandra…
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Film Review: The Favourite
★★★★★ Greek auteur Yorgos Lanthimos returns to screens with his most accessible and enjoyable film to date: The Favourite, an Eighteenth century farce, inked in gall and played with vigour. Think Mean Girls written by Jonathan Swift. Poor cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) – a noblewoman fallen on hard times – makes her way to Queen Anne’s…