Film Review: You’ve Been Trumped Too
★★★☆☆ The most terrifying lesson of Anthony Baxter’s 2011 documentary You’ve Been Trumped wasn’t the warning about the behaviour of the bully-boy billionaire business...
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In John Bleasdale.
6 September 2024
Film Review: Firebrand
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
26 July 2024
Film Review: About Dry Grasses
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
21 June 2024
Film Review: Green Border
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.
John Bleasdale
Film Review: Nocturnal Animals
★★★☆☆ Imagine The Hours, but in this version Julianne Moore’s character, instead of reading Mrs. Dalloway, reads an airport thriller, a Lee Childs or...
Film Review: In Pursuit of Silence
★★★☆☆ One summer evening in 1952 in Woodstock, New York, a pianist sat down at a piano and didn’t play it for four minutes...
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...
#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...
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...
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,...
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,...
