John Bleasdale
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Film Review: The Florida Project
★★★★★ “That’s my favourite tree,” Moonee (Brooklynn Prince) tells her friend “because it’s fallen but it still grows.” It’s a moment of lyrical beauty, underlined by a long shot of the two kids sitting in the tree itself, and sums up the theme of The Florida Project, Sean Baker’s Tangerine follow-up. Six-year-old Moonee lives with…
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Film Review: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri
★★★★☆ Following In Bruges and Seven Psychopaths, British director Martin McDonagh looks to be stamping his authority on awards season with Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a blackly comic thriller about a mother seeking justice for her murdered daughter. Film titles can be lyrical, puzzling or purely literal. Three Billboards is the latter. Frances McDormand plays…
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Film Review: You Were Never Really Here
★★★★★ “They tell me you’re a brutal man,” a client says to Joe (Joaquin Phoenix, sporting full Mel Gibson beard and a similar shimmering sense of danger and incipient psychosis) and indeed he is. We first meet the lead character of Lynne Ramsay’s new film You Were Never Really Here as he comes out of a…
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#LFF 2017: Loveless review
★★★★★ In 1985, Sting sang: “Believe me when I say to you / I hope the Russians love their children too.” Andrey Zvyagintsev’s masterful Loveless concerns itself with the same question but there’s a hopelessness that Sting’s MOR hit couldn’t hope to come close to.Boris (Alexei Rozin) and Zhenya (Maryana Spivak) are a relatively young…
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Film Review: The Meyerowitz Stories
★★★★☆ “Family isn’t a word, it’s a sentence,” stated Wes Anderson’s Royal Tenenbaums. In Noah Baumbach’s The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected), family is more an anthology: a series of short stories we tell ourselves in a way that is partial and ‘selected’.It’s a hilarious take on the well-worn trope of the dysfunctional American family,…
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#LFF 2017: The Killing of a Sacred Deer review
★★★★☆ Two years on from The Lobster, pioneering Greek Weird Wave director Yorgos Lanthimos returns to the London Film Festival with his 2017 Palme d’Or nominee The Killing of a Sacred Deer, a dark and twisted psychological thriller set in suburban America. The first sight we see is a beating human heart. It looks nothing…
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#LFF 2017: The Shape of Water review
★★★★☆ Mexican director Guillermo del Toro won his first Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival with The Shape of Water, a monstrous fairytale about the love between a mute cleaning lady (Sally Hawkins) and a creature from the Black Lagoon.Is anyone making cinema as lusciously beautiful as Guillermo del Toro at the moment?…
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Film Review: The Reagan Show
★★★★☆ The Reagan Show is timely on a number of levels. Using archive footage, news reports and White House TV, they manage to piece together the second term of the Reagan presidency and give a sobering portrait of a man whose prime concern was always his own image.It’s difficult to remember how disturbing it was…
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Film Review: Blade Runner 2049
★★★★★ One of the most eagerly-awaited films of 2017, we run the critical Voight-Kampff test to find out if Canadian director Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 is a shoddy replicant of Ridley Scott’s acclaimed 1982 original, or a new generation of science fiction. In an early draft of Hampton Francher’s Blade Runner script, there was…
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Film Review: The Bad Batch
★★☆☆☆ Following on from her stylish and well-received debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, American-Iranian Ana Lily Amirpour returns with The Bad Batch (Netflix, 22 Sep), a post-apocalyptic cannibal movie that devours its influences without ever getting to the red meat.Suki Waterhouse plays Arlen, a girl with a cherry tattoo and a Tank…