John Bleasdale
-
Film Review: Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping
★★☆☆☆ Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping is one of those films where you can hear the pitch while you’re watching the movie. “It’ll be This is Spinal Tap for the millennials, for the Beliebers,” is probably how it went. And the prospects were good. It’s a comedy from the team who brought you the sporadically…
-
Film Review: Gary Numan: Android in La La Land
★★★☆☆ Coming out of the punk explosion of the 1970s, Gary Numan had a series of hits such as Are “Friends” Electric? and Cars, which saw him hit international fame, quickly become a millionaire and inspire a devoted following. Critically lambasted, he did himself no favours supporting Maggie Thatcher and giving interviews about his love…
-
DVD Review: Weiner
★★★★☆ “Why did you let us film this?” Josh Kriegman asks Anthony Weiner towards the end of Weiner, which Kriegman directed alongside Elyse Steinberg. It’s a question that a documentarian should never ask. It goes against the fly-on-the-wall ethos and is dangerously self-defeating to the filmmakers. It’s testament to the incredible scenes played out in…
-
DVD Review: Stalker
★★★★★ Stalker is, without a doubt, Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky’s masterpiece. Based on the short novel Roadside Picnic by brothers Boris and Arkady Strugatsky (who also wrote the screenplay), the story offers a basic almost clichéd science fiction premise. A meteor has landed, a mysterious visitation of some kind, and the now forbidden Zone surrounding…
-
DVD Review: Solaris
★★★★☆ Science Fiction has regularly posited big timeless existential questions, even if the genre itself often superficially sports the kind of shiny furniture and fashion which rapidly dates. 2001: A Space Odyssey boldly offers the expanse of human history though the chairs in the orbiting space station are unmistakably 1968. Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris was his…
-
Venice 2016: 73rd lineup announced
In Rome earlier this morning, Alberto Barbera announced one of the most impressive Venice Film Festival lineups in recent years. With stiff competition from Berlin and the encroaching Toronto – which often sees Venice stripped of its North American journalists mid-week – Venice has had hard times attracting major filmmakers. Without the glitzy market of…
-
Film Review: Barry Lyndon
★★★★★ Like the protagonist of his film, Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon has risen from humble circumstances, but with a meticulously and glowingly remastered re-release courtesy of the BFI, it looks like the film will be more resilient in the pinnacle it has reached than its unhappy hero. Although, there will be at least one piece…
-
DVD Review: Poor Cow
★★★★☆ 1967 was the year of Carry On Doctor, Quatermass and the Pit and two James Bond movies. It also saw the feature debut of acclaimed television director Kenneth Loach with Poor Cow, starring Terence Stamp, fresh from his first brush of Hollywood fame and Carol White, who had starred in the television drama Cathy…
-
Film Review: The BFG
★★★☆☆ Steven Spielberg returns to cinema screens this week with an adaptation of Roald Dahl’s much-loved children’s book The BFG, and the film is an old-fashioned children’s movie of sorts. Forget Pixar’s mutton dressed as lamb: The BFG eschews any nods and winks to mum and dad – except for some humour late on –…
-
Film Review: Precious Cargo
★☆☆☆☆ During the end titles of Precious Cargo we get a close up of some dog muck. It would be nice to think this was a bit of meta-humour or a moment of candid self-awareness from first time director Max Adams, but unfortunately his risible, derivative heist movie has the audacity to actually think it’s…