John Bleasdale
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Cannes 2016: Staying Vertical review
★★★☆☆ Following up his arthouse hit Stranger by the Lake, which played in Un Certain Regard in 2013, agent provocateur Alain Guiraudie returns to Cannes and the main competition with Staying Vertical, an impishly surreal comedy that delights in shocking, prodding and baffling its besieged audience. Leo (Damien Bonnard) is a wandering filmmaker, or at…
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Cannes 2016: Sieranevada review
★★★★☆ Following past appearances in the Quinzaine and Un Certain Regard sidebars, Romanian director Cristi Puiu returns to Cannes in competition with Sieranevada, a tragi-comedy that interweaves politics, closely observed family dynamics and a heightening sense of farce. What emerges is as rich, thick and various as the funeral feast that’s prepared but endlessly deferred.…
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Cannes 2016: Personal Affairs review
★★★☆☆ Maha Haj debuts in Un Certain Regard with Personal Affairs, a gently mocking comedy of familial and personal relationships set in modern day Palestine. In Nazareth, an old couple Nabeela (Sana Shawahdeh) and Saleh (Mahmoud Shawahdeh) potter through their days to the sound of her knitting needles and soap operas and his internet found…
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Cannes 2016: Our Picks
The Croisette has been tuned and the red carpet swept. The giant poster unfurled above the Theatre Lumiere that fronts the great Palais du Cinema with an image taken from Le Mepris, Jean Luc Godard’s acid-inked love/hate letter to cinema will greet the far breezier delights of Woody Allen’s Café Society, starring Jesse Eisenberg and…
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Interview: Jeremy Saulnier, dir. Green Room
With his slow-burning revenge noir Blue Ruin, Jeremy Saulnier debuted as a startlingly original and bold young director, someone to be watched. Premiering at last year’s Cannes film festival, his difficult second album is the highly impressive grunge horror of Green Room, telling the tale of a punk band trapped backstage at a murderous Neo-Nazi…
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Film Review: Hard Tide
★★☆☆☆ “Where you going to run? This is Margate!” yells the stocky Mr. Big of the over-familiar seaside crime thriller Hard Tide. This small town on the Kent coast seems an unlikely setting for nefarious doings but the film starts out as a convincing enough tale. Jake (Nathanael Wiseman) is a drug dealer and enforcer,…
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Film Review: The Absent One
★★☆☆☆ From Borgen director Mikkel Nørgaard comes The Absent One, a lacklustre and cliché-ridden follow-up to 2013’s Danish crime thriller The Keeper of Lost Causes which suggests that the trend for Scandinavian noir might have exhausted itself. Adapted from a novel by Jussi Adler-Olsen, the film tells the story of an investigation into a forgotten…
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DVD Review: Autumn Almanac
★★★☆☆ “Who are we living with? What kind of people?” asks a character in the midst of Bela Tarr’s 1984 feature Autumn Almanac, but this being Bela Tarr the complaint of awkward cohabitation takes on a further metaphysical twist: “Are we even alive?” Hédi (Hédi Temessy) is an elderly middle class dowager, living in a…
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Film Review: Bone Tomahawk
★★★★☆ Since the 1970s it seems that every western is a revisionist western. Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Oscar winner Unforgiven is perhaps the apotheosis, but a certain Quentin Tarantino has now dipped his toe twice in the creek and the profane muddy genius of HBO’s Deadwood has also gone a long way to maintaining the validity…
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Berlin 2016: Coma review
★★★☆☆ “Every day is the same,” says one of the three women at the centre of Sara Fattahi’s Coma, an intimate and personal portrait of life in Syria at the beginning of the war. A grandmother, mother and daughter (Fattahi herself) live together in a middle class house in Damascus. Grandmother has retreated into an…
