John Bleasdale

★★★☆☆ “Let me tell you a story,” says Michael (Michael Silva), a spiritually inspired young man in the wastes of the Chilean desert. The stories he goes on to recount will appear intermittently throughout Christopher Murray’s new work The Blind Christ, which is in competition for the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival.…

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★★★☆☆ “I could’ve been a contender,” declares Marlon Brando’s brooding pugilist from On the Waterfront, and every actor these days seems to have a crack at the boxing picture to see if they can go the distance. Along with classic turns from Paul Newman and Anthony Quinn, we’ve had Stallone, De Niro and new kids…

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★★☆☆☆ In a way the title of Charlie Siskel’s documentary American Anarchist is something of a misnomer. Anarchy as a political movement doesn’t get much in terms of description. Beyond some context about demonstrations in the sixties and William Powell, its subject is only partly American in that he spent his childhood in Britain and…

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★★★★☆ Korean director Kim Jee-woon is a prolific and accomplished generic gadfly with a western – The Good, The Bad and The Weird – a horror – A Tale of Two Sisters – and a superlative revenge thriller – I Saw the Devil – all under his belt. With his new film The Age of…

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★★★☆☆ There are seven stages to grief, we’re told, from denial to acceptance. Andreas Dalsgaard and Obaidah Zytoon’s The War Show is structured with a similar seven stage process, but here the grief is not for a single individual but for a whole population, a nation who have suffered incredible violence and many who have…

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★★☆☆☆ You know when you buy a new camera, go into the garden to try it out and just snap things to see how the photographs look without necessarily caring what you capture? That’s basically what director Wim Wenders seems to be doing with new film The Beautiful Days of Aranjuez. Beginning with a series…

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★★★★☆ Premiering at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival has been greatly anticipated. Firstly, the breakout success of last year’s border epic Sicario has whetted appetites to see where the Canadian filmmaker will go next and secondly, because of the prospect of gleaning how Villeneuve will take to science fiction with the prospect…

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★★☆☆☆ “I want to marry a lighthouse keeper. / And live by the side of the sea.” sang Erika Eigan, but according to The Light Between Oceans, the new film from Blue Valentine director Derek Cianfrance, the advice would be: don’t. Michael Fassbender plays Tom Sherbourne, a veteran back from the First World War with a…

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