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...
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In John Bleasdale.
6 September 2024
Film Review: Firebrand
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
26 July 2024
Film Review: About Dry Grasses
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
21 June 2024
Film Review: Green Border
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.
John Bleasdale
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Venice 2018: The Mountain review
★★★☆☆ A troubled young man goes on tour with a renowned lobotomist in Rick Alverson’s wintry new work The Mountain, showing in competition at the...
