John Bleasdale
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Film Review: Border
★★★★☆ Ali Abbasi’s sophomore feature Border is a folkloric movie on monstrous love and what it means to be human. Not so much Beauty and the Beast as Beast and the Beast, Border is one of those films that almost from the first shot makes you feel you are in safe hands even as you go…
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Film Review: Sorry Angel
★★★☆☆ French writer and director Christophe Honoré’s Sorry Angel, a drama of gay love in early-nineties Paris, is a meandering, novelistic piece that manages to be perfectly fine without ever really being great. The new film from Honoré – miserably titled Sorry Angel in English – begins with a startling credits sequence: a series of…
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Cannes 2018: Cold War review
★★★★★ Oscar-winning Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski (Ida, My Summer of Love) enters the front-running for the Cannes Palme d’Or with his new film Cold War, a beautifully composed tone poem to doomed love in Cold War Europe. Less is most definitely more in Cold War. Using the same academy ratio and frosty black and white…
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Cannes 2018: Yomeddine review
★★★★☆ Leprosy, poverty and a story of social exclusion are the unlikely ingredients for the deeply engaging and often funny road movie Yomeddine, which entered the competition for the Palme d’Or at the 71st Cannes Film Festival earlier today. Beshay (Rady Gamal) is a man who has recovered from leprosy but still bears the horrible…
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Cannes 2018: Wildlife review
★★★☆☆ There Will Be Blood and Little Miss Sunshine actor Paul Dano turns his hand to directing in Wildlife, which opened the Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Cannes Film Festival. Starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Carey Mulligan, Dano’s directorial debut is a sincere and often handsome portrait of American suburban melancholia. It’s 1960: a “heck…
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Cannes 2018: Our picks of the festival
The red carpet unrolls, the paparazzi mount their step ladders, and Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina kiss above the Palais du Cinema under an azure sky. The talk in the build up to 71st Cannes Film Festival has been far less sunny. The controversial face-off with Netflix and the banning of selfies on the red carpet…
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DVD Review: Score: A Film Music Documentary
★★★☆☆ Whether roaring fanfares, scything murderous strings or tear-jerking themes, film music is explored in Matt Schrader’s new documentary Score, boasting a wealth of contemporary interviews with jobbing composers as well as a history of Hollywood film music. The movies were never silent. From the first experiments of the Lumiere brothers in 1895 and the…
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DVD Review: The Colour of Pomegranates
★★★★☆ A remastered re-release of Soviet film director and artist Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomegranates, courtesy of specialist distributors Second Sight, is an opportunity to rediscover a unique cinematic experience. Cinema has not treated poetry particularly well. Either we get faithful reproductions of inciting incidents, or biopics dosed with out of focus shots of…
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DVD Review: When the Wind Blows
★★★★☆ Jimmy Murakami’s adaptation of Raymond Briggs’ graphic novel When the Wind Blows is a moving tale of a nuclear holocaust and its impact on the lives of an ordinary married couple of old age pensioners. As mad as the Trump era is for anyone who grew up or lived through the 1980s there’s a…
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DVD Review: The Big Sick
★★★★☆ Starring Kumail Nanjiani and Zoe Kazan, The Big Sick is that rarest of things: a funny and smart romantic comedy that is actually about something and is good enough to make you care for its characters. The move from television comedy to big screen exposure is fraught with danger. For every Will Ferrell –…