John Bleasdale
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Film Review: L’Amant Double
★★☆☆☆ Prolific French director François Ozon returns to UK screens with his slightly camp psychological thriller L’Amant Double (The Double Lover), a kind of Fifty Shades of Dead Ringers. But will it be pegged back by its now notorious sex scenes? Marine Vacth (who starred in Ozon’s Jeune et Jolie) plays Chloe, a 25 year-old former…
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Film Review: In the Fade
★★★☆☆ Head On and Soul Kitchen director Fatih Akin returns to UK cinemas this week with In the Fade, a solid courtroom/revenge drama elevated by a superb performance – acting for the first time in a German production – by Diane Kruger. We first meet Katja in prison where she is about to become Mrs. Sekerci, the…
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Cannes 2017: The Day After review
★★★☆☆ With a director as prolific as South Korea’s Hong Sang-soo, it’s not particularly surprising that he has two films showing at Cannes this year: Claire’s Camera, a colourful novella of a movie starring Isabelle Huppert; and, up for the Palme d’Or, The Day After.Bong-wan (Hong regular Kwon Hae-hyo) is a celebrated author who manages…
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Cannes 2017: I Am Not a Witch review
★★★★☆ The debut from Welsh-Zambian director Rungano Nyoni, I Am Not a Witch created quite the stir on premiering in Cannes. It’s the tale of a young orphan girl played by nine-year-old Maggie Mulubwa, who is accused by villagers of being a witch.The tone is set by the comic police inquest into the girl with…
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Film Review: Good Time
★★★☆☆ Robert Pattinson has done his damnedest to lose the fangs from his Twilight fame. Indie credentials have been the crux of the process with the likes of Cosmopolis, Maps of the Stars and The Rover. Now he’s back with Benny and Josh Safdie’s street-level crime thriller Good Time. Pattinson plays Connie Nikas, a small-time criminal…
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Cannes 2017: A Gentle Creature review
★★☆☆☆ Sergei Loznitsa first came to prominence with 2012’s In the Fog, a powerful drama of guilt and suspicion. His new film A Gentle Creature is loosely based on a Dostoyevsky short story and is redolent with the suffering and heaviness of the great Russian worrier. Despite a first half of great promise, the film…
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Cannes 2017: Walking Past the Future review
★★☆☆☆ The only Chinese film scheduled to screen in the official competition at Cannes this year is Li Ruijun’s underwhelming Walking Past the Future, which is being shown – quite rightly, as it happens – as part of the Un Certain Regard section.We first meet young woman Yaoting as she waits to pick up an…
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Cannes 2017: Rodin review
★☆☆☆☆ Sculpture is the art of turning lifeless stone into something that looks alive, flesh, living bodies and movement. Jacques Doillon’s Rodin, in competition at Cannes, does precisely the opposite, turning living beings – passionate artists, no less – into lumps of lifeless clay.Vincent Lindon, who deservedly won the Best Actor award here with The…
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Cannes 2017: Radiance review
★★★☆☆ In 1997, Naomi Kawase became the youngest winner of the Camera d’Or for her first feature Suzaku. She has returned seven times in total and this year enters the main competition for the fifth time with Radiance, a thoughtful meditation on seeing and cinema.Misako (Ayame Misaki) works for a company that provides audio description…
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Film Review: Jeune Femme
★★★★☆ We first meet Paula (Laetitia Dosch) as she bangs her head against the closed-door of her apartment with such violence that it knocks her unconscious. Her photographer boyfriend has jilted her and she is not taking it well. She yells at the doctor treating her cut head until he threatens to commit her. Escaping…
