John Bleasdale

★★☆☆☆ Italian writer-director Francesca Comencini adapts her own fraught, hysterical novel for the big screen in Stories of Love that Cannot Belong to this World, which remains as fraught, hysterical and unbearable as her protagonist – even via a new medium.Lucia Mascino plays Claudia, a literature professor who lives in Rome and is obsessed with…

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★★★☆☆ Premiering at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival, Samuel Jouy’s feature debut Sparring sees Mathieu Kassovitz star as an ageing slugger in a boxing movie which mixes up the below the belt pounding of Fat City with the emotional jabs of The Champ.Steve (Kassovitz) is a veteran boxer coming to the end of his…

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★★☆☆☆ Multiple New York stories interlace in Salt Lake City-born director Dustin Guy Defa’s Locarno 2017 select Person to Person, an ensemble piece which hails back to early John Sayles and Jim Jarmusch for inspiration but doesn’t quite live up to its heavyweight influences.Bene (Bene Coopersmith) gets a call about a rare Charlie Parker record;…

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★★★☆☆ A beguiling, baffling and occasionally beautiful work which premiered at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival, Juliana Rojas and Marco Dutra’s Good Manners is a genre-hopping tale of class, race, sexuality and werewolves in modern day São Paulo.Clara (Isabél Zuaa) goes for a job interview as a nanny for a wealthy and pregnant young…

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★★★☆☆ Hollywood is never happier than when looking at Hollywood. From the polished, ironic magnificence of The Player to the lo-fi grunge of The Canyons, the starry side of LA has swallowed its own tail on numerous occasions, much to its great satisfaction. Along similar lines follows recent Locarno offering Gemini.With Gemini, former mumblecore meister…

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★★☆☆☆ When Jacques Blanchot (Vincent Macaigne) loses everything – his wife, his son, his house – he finds comfort first in buying a dog, before increasingly behaving like one. Receiving its world premiere at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival, Samuel Benchetrit’s Dog might be barking, but has it got the requisite bite?Kafka’s famous novella…

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★★☆☆☆ Entering the strange world of bodybuilders, Denis Côté’s documentary A Skin So Soft offers a meditative – if at times obtuse – take that is not so much Pumping Iron as Waiting for Glutes. “It can take years to get the right shape,” says one of the subjects of A Skin So Soft.We follow…

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★★★★☆ Alexander Fehling and Bérénice Bejo play a couple trying to make their own personal European Union work against the stunning backdrop of the Italian Dolomites in German director Jan Zabeil’s new thriller Three Peaks.Aaron (Fehling) and Lea (Bejo) are an attractive young couple. We first spy them in gorgeous long distance shot of a…

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★★★★☆ Starring Harry Dean Stanton, John Carroll Lynch’s Lucky is an ornery meditation on old age and extinction in New Mexico. Screening at this year’s Locarno International Film Festival, it doesn’t exactly rage against the dying of the light but certainly cusses and blows smoke in its face.Harry Dean Stanton has clocked some mileage in…

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★★★☆☆ Premiering at this year’s 70th Locarno International Film Festival, Icelandic director Hlynur Pálmason’s debut film Winter Brothers is a bold, chilly, dark work with occasional glints of humour, like the sparks that fly of the picks of the workers in the opening scenes.Shapes move in the darkness, the noise of heavy industry throbs on…

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