John Bleasdale
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Venice 2017: The Insult review
★★★☆☆ In Lebanese-born director Ziad Doueiri’s The Insult, an apparently minor argument on a Beirut street escalates into a full-blown legal battle, which itself threatens to erupt into civil violence as it rips open the festering wounds of historic religious and national resentment. Tony Hana (Adel Karam) is a mechanic living in an apartment with…
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Film Review: First Reformed
★★★★☆ Legendary screenwriter (Taxi Driver, Raging Bull) and director (Mishima, Cat People) Paul Schrader returns to form with a startling, sombre and quite extraordinary Bergman-esque portrait of a priest tortured by his own personal demons. “I’m God’s lonely man,” Travis Bickle stated in Paul Schrader’s first script. Loneliness, desperation and guilt are seeded throughout his…
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Venice 2017: Nico, 1988 review
★★★☆☆ Opening the Horizons sidebar, Susanna Nicchiarelli’s Nico, 1988 is a biopic of the German songstress who found fame with The Velvet Underground. Danish singer and actress Trine Dyrholm plays the diva with verve and energy, in a portrait which is also something of a reevaluation.“Don’t call me Nico,” Christa Päffgen (Dyrholm) tells her manager…
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Film Review: Downsizing
★★★★☆ Alexander Payne returns to cinemas this week with Downsizing, a surreal sci-fi comedy starring Matt Damon, Hong Chau and Kristen Wiig, which posits a revolutionary new technology that can shrink people as a way of reducing environmental damage. Following a discovery in a Norwegian laboratory, a new drug is released which allows for the…
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Film Review: Bushwick
★★☆☆☆ Many a film has landed in Cannes laden with Sundance buzz. One year it was Beasts of the Southern Wild, another it was Whiplash. The latter injury will have befallen many who went into Cary Murnion and Jonathan Milott’s B-movie wannabe Bushwick with high expectations.We approach New York via aerial helicopter shots, but something’s…
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Film Review: Dark Night
★★☆☆☆ The defining quality of poetry is that much of the page is blank. This is the ‘white space’ literary critic Christopher Ricks claimed that words dissolve into, allowing the reader room to think. In Tim Sutton’s Dark Night, that white space becomes little more than a blank stare.Sutton’s film is often wilfully obscurantist, supporting…
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DVD Review: The Handmaiden
★★★★☆ A masterful adaptation of British author Sarah Waters’ novel Fingersmith, Oldboy director Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden transplants the action from Victorian England to Korea and Japan, but the sense of gothic sexual hypocrisy and feminist fightback thankfully remains.Sookee (Kim Tae-ri) is a Korean artful dodger, a famed pickpocket whose mother was hanged. She lives…
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Film Review: Wajib
★★★★☆ A whip-smart, moving comedy of family and community, Annemarie Jacir’s third feature Wajib sees a father and son embark on a day-long odyssey around Nazareth hand-delivering wedding invitations. In the process, they discover the complexity of their own relationship. Shadi (Saleh Bakri) returns to Nazareth from Italy for the occasion of his sister’s wedding.…
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Locarno 2017: Madame Hyde review
★★★☆☆ Isabelle Huppert stars as a beleaguered French science teacher who, following a lightning strike, sporadically transforms into a fire lady. Serge Bozon’s absurdist revision of Robert Louis Stevenson’s tale has some wonderful moments but doesn’t quite je kill it.Madame Gequil (Huppert) works in the Arthur Rimbaud High School and it is unclear what is…
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Locarno 2017: The First Lap review
★★★★☆ A young couple Ji-young (Kim Sae-byeok) and Su-hyeon (Cho Hyun-chul) reach a decisive moment in their lives in South Korean Kim Dae-hwan’s impressive slow-burner The First Lap, which received its world premiere at the Locarno International Film Festival last week.South Korea is at a crossroads, embroiled in political demonstrations and a government on the…
