John Bleasdale
-
Film Review: I, Daniel Blake
★★★★☆ Following the disappointing period dalliance of Jimmy’s Hall, Ken Loach’s Palme d’Or-winning I, Daniel Blake is something of a return to form. It stands as a succinct and furious raging against the dying of the light, or more accurately the snuffing of the light by a privatised and punitive system more intent on lowering…
-
#LFF 2016: Neruda review
★★★★★ Chile, 1948. The poet, communist and senator Pablo Neruda (Luis Gnecco) has become a thorn in the side of the government and President Gabriel Gonzalez Vidala (Alfredo Castro), a man he helped elect. Clampdowns on subversives, trade unionists and strikers make Neruda’s continued parliamentary role untenable and the choice is either to flee or…
-
Film Review: American Honey
★★☆☆☆ You can sometimes tell when a film has finally lost the plot. In Andrea Arnold’s excruciating road movie American Honey, it’s the moment a bear failed to eat the protagonist. By this stage – already a good two hours into the film – some viewers would have happily bestowed a Revenant-style mauling on anybody…
-
Film Review: Swiss Army Man
★★★☆☆ How far can a fart joke get you? That’s the question posed by Sundance offering Swiss Army Man. The answer is surprisingly far, but ultimately it’s going to start to go stale at some point. Viral video artists Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s debut feature is a loopy comedy of visual inventiveness which has…
-
Venice 2016: Voyage of Time review
★☆☆☆☆ Director? Malick? Where have you gone? There was a time when you took the lives of individual characters – sociopathic youth, itinerant workers, a platoon of soldiers – and via them glimpsed the sublime through the cracks their lives made in the world. Yet now your gaze is directed wholly at the glory and…
-
Venice 2016: These Days review
★☆☆☆☆ Venice is notorious for foisting shoddy local produce on its delegates, but this year has been particularly chronic. Director Alberto Barbera admitted in an interview that many of the best Italian filmmakers had either just released a film or were not in time to be considered for inclusion. In competition we’ve had the ambitious…
-
Venice 2016: Planetarium review
★★★★☆ Natalie Portman must love Venice. When twirling psycho-ballerina drama Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan debuted on the Lido in 2010, Portman definitively glissaded away from her precocious debut in Luc Besson’s Leon and all those godawful Star Wars prequels. This year sees her give two stunning performances: the eponymous, awards-ready role in Pable Larrain’s Jackie…
-
Venice 2016: Paradise review
★★★☆☆ There’s a lot that’s wonderful about Andrei Konchalovsky’s Holocaust drama Paradise and yet there’s something fundamentally wrong with the film. Beginning in France in the 1940s, we first meet a French police officer in the upper echelons of the Vichy regime. He’s a family man who enjoys brisk walks in the woods with his…
-
Venice 2016: On the Milky Road review
★★★☆☆ Emir Kusturica enters the race for the Golden Lion with On the Milky Road, a bonkers Balkan wartime romance that, with its full fat, double cream richness, may be too much for many. That said, the first half-hour features some exhilarating filmmaking and there are moments of pure joy mixed in with the feathers,…
-
Venice 2016: Jackie review
★★★★☆ Pablo Larraín makes his English language debut with the Darren Aronofsky produced Jackie which, although more conventional, is no more a biopic than his Cannes triumph Neruda. In a career best role, Natalie Portman plays the role of America’s most famous First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy, a woman who went from being a fashion clotheshorse to…