John Bleasdale
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DVD Review: Creepy
★★☆☆☆ The unnerving neighbour is a shopworn trope of domestic thrillers and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Creepy is only an occasionally effective entry into the genre. Following a face-off with a psychopath that almost costs him his life, Detective Takakura (Hidetoshi Nishijima) resigns from the force, and retreats to the relative tranquillity of academia. Along with his…
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Film Review: La La Land
★★★★★ “Why do you say romantic like it’s a dirty word?” Seb (Ryan Gosling) a struggling jazz pianist asks barista and wannabe actor Mia (Emma Stone) as they stand on the Warner Bros back-lot considering their respective futures. Damien Chazelle’s follow-up to the award-winning Whiplash is whip-smart, full-on movie nostalgia at its best and despite…
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Film Review: Life, Animated
★★★★☆ We all love a Disney movie. Many childhoods have been warmed by their glow and generations are defined by what set of Disney characters are close to their hearts. For older viewers, the animals of Bambi and The Jungle Book were childhood friends, for the youngest among us perhaps the liberated women of Frozen…
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Film Review: I Am Not a Serial Killer
★★★☆☆ I Am Not a Serial Killer has a promisingly schlocky title, but Billy O’Brien’s adaptation of Dan Wells’ YA novel (scripted with Christopher Hyde) never quite escapes its adolescent inspiration. John (Max Records, last seen as the kid in Where the Wild Things Are) lives with his mom (Laura Fraser) in Clayton, a small…
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Film Review: The Coming War on China
★★★☆☆ Since Donald Trump won the US Presidential election there’s been a whole smorgasbord of geo-political anxieties to keep you awake at night. Oliver Stone’s Snowden was a timely reminder of the massive repressive state apparatus of para-legal or illegal surveillance that will be at the fingertips of the new occupant of the Oval Office.…
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Film Review: Starless Dreams
★★★★★ “Here the pain drips from the walls,” says Somayeh, an inmate of a juvenile female detention centre on the outskirts of Tehran. Somayeh is one of the subjects of Mehrdad Oskouei’s remarkable documentary Starless Dreams. She’s one of the more mature inmates, guilty of a terrible crime, but provoked by an impossible situation. Following…
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Film Review: Gimme Danger
★★★☆☆ James Newell Osterberg Jr. is better known as Iggy Pop, inventor of the stage dive, proto-punk jester and the lead singer of The Stooges. Sitting down with cult New York film director Jim Jarmusch, Pop, alongside his erstwhile bandmates, goes through the history of one of the bands which – to echo a claim…
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Film Review: You’ve Been Trumped Too
★★★☆☆ The most terrifying lesson of Anthony Baxter’s 2011 documentary You’ve Been Trumped wasn’t the warning about the behaviour of the bully-boy billionaire business man Donald Trump, but rather the terrifying acquiescence of state players, police and politicians in facilitating his behaviour and crushing any opposition no matter how tiny. Alec Salmond, the SNP, the…
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Film Review: Nocturnal Animals
★★★☆☆ Imagine The Hours, but in this version Julianne Moore’s character, instead of reading Mrs. Dalloway, reads an airport thriller, a Lee Childs or James Patterson. That’s more or less the plot of Tom Ford’s sophomore effort Nocturnal Animals, returning to the Lido once more after the warm reception of the fashion designer’s first film…
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Film Review: In Pursuit of Silence
★★★☆☆ One summer evening in 1952 in Woodstock, New York, a pianist sat down at a piano and didn’t play it for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The audience were furious and the composer and pianist were even threatened. The piece was of course 4:33 of Silence by John Cage. A musical equivalent of Duchamp’s…