John Bleasdale
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Film Review: Victoria and Abdul
★☆☆☆☆ The last years in the life of Queen Victoria and her friendship with an Indian subject are the focus of British director Stephen Frears’ latest film Victoria and Abdul. Sadly, a cliché-ridden plot ultimately inhibits what could have been a spritely historical period drama.Frears has had some success with monarchs. In 2006, The Queen…
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Film Review: Mother!
★★★★★ Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan director Darren Aronofsky returns to cinema screens with Mother!, an utterly insane film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, which begins as a haunted house tale before transforming into an allegorical journey.Aronofsky has always been a filmmaker who has lived on the edge between the profound and…
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DVD Review: Song to Song
★★☆☆☆ People in glass houses shouldn’t be in Terrence Malick films, but invariably they are and the temptation to throw bricks is becoming almost overpowering. Song to Song is the latest of a triptych of contemporary relationship melodramas from the once-reclusive auteur.As ever, famous beautiful people wander while Emmanuel Lubezki’s camera butterflies around them before…
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Toronto 2017: Custody review
★★★★☆ Making its way to this year’s TIFF following an award-winning debut at the Venice Film Festival, French director Xavier Legrand’s Custody is a powerful domestic drama of a toxic father who continues to terrorise his family following an unsavoury marital separation. The minute we meet Antoine (Denis Ménochet), there’s a sense of menace. He…
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Film Review: Sweet Country
★★★★☆ In UK cinemas this week, Warwick Thornton’s Sweet Country is an Outback western as harsh and beautiful as the land it describes. Hamilton Morris plays the man on the run and Bryan Brown is the police sergeant who must hunt him down. When Sam (Morris) shoots Harry March (Ewan Leslie), he knows he’s in…
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Film Review: Mektoub, My Love
★★★☆☆ Blue Is the Warmest Colour director Abdellatif Kechiche’s Mektoub, My Love finally arrives in UK cinemas this week, over a year after its Venice premiere back in 2017. It’s a beautiful, sun-kissed film – as warm as August and almost as long. “I have all the time in the world,” says Amin (Shaïn Boumedine), the protagonist…
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Venice 2017: Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond review
★★★☆☆ Showing Out of Competition at Venice, Jim & Andy: The Great Beyond goes behind the scenes on the shooting of Miloš Forman’s Man on the Moon, and reveals how Jim Carrey’s portrayal of Andy Kaufman was partly a tribute to the subject and partly flat-out insanity.Kaufman was as much a performance artist as a…
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Venice 2017: Una Famiglia review
★☆☆☆☆ Sebastiano Riso flies the Italian flag on the Lido with his new film Una Famiglia, a claustrophobic, scuzzy drama about a couple engaged in the illicit trade of selling babies. It’s a dour, monotonous, predictable and dull effort that doesn’t deserve its place in competition.We first spot Maria (Micaela Ramazzotti) and Vincenzo (French singer…
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Venice 2017: The Third Murder review
★★★☆☆ When a factory owner is murdered by an ex-employee the guilt appears certain and the case cut and dried. However, an ambitious lawyer soon discovers that there are layers of guilt and ends up wondering who can judge who in Hirokazu Kore-eda’s The Third Murder.Japanese auteur and festival favourite Kore-eda has made his reputation…
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Film Review: Ex Libris: The New York Public Library
★★★☆☆ Frederick Wiseman returns to UK cinemas this week with Ex Libris, a three-hour-plus-change piece on the New York Public Library system. It’s more interesting than a three-hour documentary about libraries has any right to be, but not quite as fascinating as hoped. “A library is not just a place to store books,” an academic…