John Bleasdale
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Film Review: Catfight
★★☆☆☆ Talk about timing. Hillary loses the election, there’s a record-breaking Women’s March in Washington and then the week of a revitalised International Women’s Day, Catfight bitch slaps itself onto our screens. A post-feminist piece of backbiting, Onur Tukel’s hit-and-miss satire takes aim at a world of privileged women – which at the moment doesn’t…
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Film Review: The Student
★★★☆☆ Russian writer-director Kirill Serebrennikov first came to prominence outside of Russia with 2012’s Dostoyevskian tale of marital woe, Betrayal. Serebrennikov has adapted German playwright Marius von Mayenburg’s Martyr for The Student, a dark and slightly hysterical portrait of fundamentalist fever. Veniamin (Petr Skvortsov) is a troubled young man. His mother (Julia Aug) despairs of him as…
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The Oscars: Just a Hollywood meat parade?
Of all the Oscar protests – from Sacheen Littlefeather and Marlon Brando in 1973, to #OscarsSoWhite last year, Michael Moore castigating George W. Bush and Richard Gere pleading for a free Tibet – a key one remains that of George C. Scott. His protest wasn’t about diversity, or the war in Iraq, or Hollywood’s treatment…
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Film Review: It’s Only the End of the World
★★☆☆☆ Xavier Dolan has adapted theatrical works before. 2013’s Tom at the Farm was a divisive feature but rendered Michael Marc Bouchard’s play in a widescreen cinematic landscape. It’s Only the End of the World sees Dolan adapt Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play of the same name. In the film’s press notes, the director records how he…
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Film Review: Tanna
★★★★☆ “Life is sweet living below the volcano,” says Dain, one of the star-crossed lovers of the South Pacific island of Tanna which gives its name to the Oscar-nominated feature directed by documentary filmmakers Bentley Dean and Martin Butler. Here, islanders do seem at first to have a paradisiacal life. We see the tribe’s life…
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Film Review: Hidden Figures
★★★☆☆ Theodore Melfi’s Hidden Figures is the kind of movie which seems pre-tooled to be a school favourite during Black History Month. Based on the book by Margot Lee Shetterly, the Oscar-nominated film reveals the hidden history of three black women employed by NASA. This was when computers were people, mathematicians who did the hard…
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Berlin 2017: Hostages review
★★★★☆ In 1983, a group of young people from relatively privileged backgrounds attempted to hijack a plane and fly to the West from Soviet-controlled Georgia. With his fourth feature Hostages, Rezo Gigineishvili gives a bleakly thrilling account of the tragedy and how it unfolded. We first meet our angry young people on a beach. A…
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Film Review: Taxi Driver
★★★★★ “Thank God for the rain which has helped wash away the garbage and trash off the sidewalks.” So speaks God’s lonely man Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) as he trawls the streets of New York once more in this timely BFI reissue of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver. A Vietnam vet with an unsteady grip…
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Film Review: Fences
★★★★☆ Following a string of sub-Tony Scott thrillers and the less than magnificent The Magnificent Seven, Denzel Washington returns to acting with a visible hunger in an adaptation of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning drama Fences. Working behind the camera in his third outing as director, Washington stays as true to the stage play as he…
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Film Review: Hacksaw Ridge
★★★☆☆ No one would mistake Mel Gibson for the embodiment of subtlety. From his blood-soaked Scottish romp Braveheart to his blood-soaked The Passion of the Christ, Gibson has always made his films with sledgehammer blows, a simplistic moral universe and thumping melodramatic beats, usually in slow motion. Anyone worrying that the topic of a conscientious…