John Bleasdale
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Feature: Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev
“About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters,” W.H. Auden wrote in his poem on Brueghel. The words could easily have applied to both the subject and the creator of Andrei Rublev, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1966 masterpiece. A film about suffering and art, the spiritual journey towards transendence, and the muddy, sodden reality of day-to-day…
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DVD Review: Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach
★★★☆☆ Coming hot on the heels of his Palme d’Or triumph I, Daniel Blake, Louise Osmond’s biographical documentary of Ken Loach Versus: The Life and Films of Ken Loach couldn’t have been more timely and it is a fitting if suitably modest and workmanlike survey of the radical left wing filmmaker and his impressive body…
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DVD Review: Evolution
★★★★☆ From Innocence director Lucile Hadžihalilović, Evolution is another one word title that provokes as much as it suggests. An enigmatic stone of a film, it’s a glowing entry in the sub-genre of fabulist science fiction of Never Let Me Go and Under the Skin. We first meet young Nicolas (Max Brebant) underwater. He floats…
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Film Review: Down By Love
★★☆☆☆ Amour fou in a French penitentiary has Blue is the Warmest Colour star Adele Exarchopoulos falling in love with the prison warden in Pierre Godeau’s slickly-produced true-story tale of forbidden passion, Down By Love. We first meet Anna (Exarchopoulos) as she arrives at a prison to await her trial. Focusing on her familiar features…
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Cannes 2016: I, Daniel Blake wins Palme d’Or
The 69th Cannes Film Festival was a strange menagerie of beasts. Front-loaded with perhaps too many of Thierry Frémaux’s usual suspects – Woody Allen, Ken Loach, the Dardenne brothers, Pedro Almodóvar – their contributions were often simply whelming: not over, not under, just there. Even some of the younger directors in competition are now becoming…
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Cannes 2016: The Salesman review
★★★★☆ Asghar Farhadi is a film director of such consistent quality and control that the prospect of one of his new films is like buying the latest big fat novel by a favourite author. It sits on the shelf with all the complexity of the human universe lying in wait within. Competing for the Palme…
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Cannes 2016: Elle review
★★☆☆☆ Usually when we say a movie is reminiscent of the seventies, we mean it has a certain high quality to it redolent of that glorious era, but Paul Verhoeven’s new film hit the Croisette, Elle – his first feature since Black Book – is seventies in its sexual attitudes and particularly its take on…
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Cannes 2016: Risk review
★★★★☆ Following the Oscar-winning documentary Citizenfour, which recorded Edward Snowden blowing the loudest of whistles, Laura Poitras arrives in Cannes’ Quinzaine sidebar with Risk, a superb character study of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The divisive and controversial figure is a hero of free speech to some, a reckless egomaniac with predatory sexual practices to others,…
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Cannes 2016: Ma’ Rosa review
★★★☆☆ Going to see a Brillante Mendoza film at the Cannes is an awkward experience. He’s been granted fairly regular festival berths both here and in Venice while exhibiting to the world a series of films that foreground the poor, the powerless and the oppressed. To exit the grime and grimness of his latest, Ma’…
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Cannes 2016: The Neon Demon review
★★☆☆☆ Nicolas Winding Refn – or NWR as he prefers to sign himself now – returns to Cannes with fashion world-based horror movie The Neon Demon. The film is a postmodern Women Beware Women and, despite the presence of two female co-screenwriters in the form of Polly Stenham and Mary Laws, perhaps the most misogynistic…
