John Bleasdale
-
Venice 2016: The Distinguished Citizen review
★★★☆☆ Daniel Mantovani (Oscar Martinez) is a celebrated Nobel Prize-winning author living in Barcelona. He hasn’t returned to his hometown of Salas, Argentina in forty years despite setting all of his novels there. To the surprise of everyone he agrees to personally collect a proffered reward as a ‘distinguished citizen’ and maybe rediscover his roots.…
-
Film Review: A Woman’s Life
★★★☆☆ Following hot on the heels of the Cannes prize winner The Measure of a Man, French director Stéphane Brizé returns with his adaptation of Guy de Maupassant’s first novel, A Woman’s Life. The woman in question is Jeanne (Judith Chemla), the only daughter of wealthy aristocracy. Her father is the Baron (Jean-Pierre Darroussin) and…
-
Venice 2016: Prank review
★★☆☆☆ Showing in the Critics’ Week sidebar at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Vincent Biron’s Prank is a coming of age story that never quite escapes the constraints of its own claustrophobic Quebecois world. Stefie (Etienne Galloy) is a gormless teenage loner who spends his spare time practicing the clarinet – the similarity to Ferris…
-
Venice 2016: Piuma review
★★☆☆☆ The general rule of thumb is that the best Italian films looking to premier each year go to either Berlin or Cannes, because in Venice any Italian effort in competition is viewed with suspicion. In the case of Roan Johnson’s by-the-numbers pregnancy comedy Piuma, the suspicion is amply justified. This is as light as…
-
Venice 2016: One More Time with Feeling review
★★★★☆ One More Time with Feeling is a music documentary in a minor key, a song sung about grief and loss and trying to carry on when you really do not want to carry on. Like Cave’s music, there is melancholy and honesty. Shot in an immersive and starkly beautiful black and white 3D, the…
-
Venice 2016: The Untamed review
★★★★☆ Imagine if H.P. Lovecraft had written The Joy of Sex, or better still a porn parody of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Neither of these analogies are particularly accurate but we’re in the right territory – the wild region to use a more literal translation of the original title – for Mexican director Amat Escalante’s polymorphously…
-
Venice 2016: King of the Belgians review
★★★☆☆ Scottish filmmaker Duncan Lloyd (Pieter van der Houwen) has been tasked with the seemingly impossible job of making a documentary on the Belgian monach King Nicolas III (Peter van der Begin), entitled Our King, intended to improve the king’s bumbling image. In fact, there’s something of our own future king Charles III in the…
-
Venice 2016: Spira Mirabilis review
★★★★☆ In every festival there’s a film where the attrition rate of walkouts is notably high. So far at this year’s Venice, the ignominious Golden Lion would have to go to the impressionistic documentary Spira Mirabilis. And it is a pity, because although the film is a challenging watch, demanding attention and patience from audiences,…
-
Venice 2016: Safari review
★★★☆☆ “The killing is only a small part,” says Gerald, one of the subjects of Ulrich Seidl’s new film Safari. By its conclusion you may well be inclined to agree with him. There’s the stalking, the anticipation, the price list, like some murderous menu for the hunters to browse through, the stalking of the prey…
-
Venice 2016: Brimstone review
★★★☆☆ You have to admire the nerve of Dutch director Martin Koolhoven. The title card for his first English language effort reads ‘Martin Koolhoven’s Brimstone‘, and the film itself is full of confidence and grand gestures: an ornery bloody-minded western with grit in its gut and a wet splash of horror. Liz (Dakota Fanning) lives…