John Bleasdale
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Cannes 2017: April’s Daughter review
★★★☆☆ April is the cruelest mum in Michel Franco’s Un Certain Regard entry April’s Daughter. The Mexican director and Cannes favourite has produced another disturbing character study, following Tim Roth’s obsessive nurse in Chronic which screened a mere two years ago.April’s Daughter stars Pedro Almodóvar regular Emma Suarez as April, an estranged mother who after…
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Cannes 2017: Wind River review
★★★☆☆ Taylor Sheridan is a wonderful screenwriter in his own right, as the startling thrillers Sicario and Hell or High Water both contest. However, he’s a terrible writer of film titles. From the idiomatic blandness of Hell or High Water to the latest flatulence of Wind River.Fortunately, the latter – his debut as a director…
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Film Review: Happy End
★★★★☆ A two-time Palme d’Or winner, acerbic Austrian director Michel Haneke returns to UK cinema screens this week with his latest film, Happy End. It may be something of a greatest hits mixtape, but it’s also an arresting offering. Famille Laurent are a rich and successful family living in Calais in a sumptuous villa, served by…
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Cannes 2017: 120 Beats Per Minute review
★★★☆☆ ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was an activist group set up in New York to draw attention campaign for those impacted by AIDS. They were a pressure group who specialised in public and well-publicised acts of civil disobedience. The Paris branch of ACT UP is the subject of writer-director Robin Campillo’s new…
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Film Review: Redoubtable
★★★☆☆ Michel Hazanavicius’ Redoubtable takes an acidic look at the iconoclastic Jean-Luc Godard and very much ‘clasts’ the icon. Just as May and 1968 is exploding in France, Jean-Luc Godard (Louis Garrel) although at the height of his success and newly married to 19-year-old philosophy student Anne Wiazemsky (Stacy Miller), is going through an existential crisis,…
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Film Review: How to Talk to Girls at Parties
★★☆☆☆ Liquid Sky gets a remake from the guys who made The Inbetweeners. Or at least that’s what How to Talk to Girls at Parties looks like. Director John Cameron Mitchell brings us an adaptation of a Neil Gaiman short story starring Nicole Kidman. 1977. Croydon. Schoolboy Enn (Alex Sharp) is a punk. We know…
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Film Review: Jupiter’s Moon
★★★☆☆ Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes back in 2014 with his satirical canine war fable White God. He returns to UK cinemas this week with Jupiter’s Moon, an ambitious political thriller that puts the ‘high’ in high concept. Aryan (Zsombor Jéger) is a Syrian refugee fleeing Homs, accompanied by…
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Film Review: Let the Sunshine In
★★★★☆ New from Claire Denis, Let the Sunshine In is a pithily precise portrait of the love life of an artist. The problem with Isabelle – Juliette Binoche, getting her teeth deep into the role – isn’t the usual torrid passionate affairs you might expect of her artistic milieu. Rather, Isabelle seems as much prey…
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Cannes 2017: Wonderstruck review
★★☆☆☆ “Please do not touch the exhibits,” say the signs in most museums. In competition at Cannes, Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck is a touchy-feely cabinet of wonders which occasionally enraptures but also drags, never quite achieving the promise of its title.It’s 1977 and Ben (Oakley Fegley), a young child who has recently lost his mother, lives…
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Film Review: Ismael’s Ghosts
★★☆☆☆ Released this week in UK cinemas after opening last year’s Cannes Film Festival, Arnaud Desplechin’s Ismael’s Ghosts is a veritable who’s who of French cinema, including Mathieu Amalric as titular film director Ismael. Ismael smokes and drinks and is working on a film based on the adventures of his diplomat/spy brother Ivan (Louis Garrel).…
