John Bleasdale
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Film Review: Welcome to Leith
★★★☆☆ Leith is a small town in Grant County, North Dakota. Forgotten and dilapidated, it looks like – as one out-of-towner notes – “B-roll to the Walking Dead”. There are only 24 residents and one business open; the Mayor Ryan Schock drives the school bus and when a particularly numerous family relocate there, they joke…
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DVD Review: Kiss of the Spider Woman
★★★★☆ Thirty years after its Cannes Film Festival debut, Héctor Babenco’s Kiss of the Spider Woman gets a special edition release on DVD and Blu-ray. A gay man accused of ‘corrupting a minor’, Molina (William Hurt), and political prisoner Valentin (Raul Julia) find themselves sharing a prison cell during the Brazilian military Junta. A left…
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DVD Review: Shelter
★★★☆☆ The dedication which closes Paul Bettany’s debut film Shelter (2014) reads “To the couple who lived outside my building”. Expressing both detachment and proximity, it admits to the essential discomfort that characterises Hollywood’s occasional flirtations with vagrancy. From The Fisher King to The Soloist, the homeless are treated with a mixture of whimsy and…
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DVD Review: How to Change the World
★★★★☆ “If you wait for the meek to inherit the Earth, there won’t be any Earth left for them to inherit,” says Bob Hunter towards the close of Jerry Rothwell’s entertaining and inspiring documentary How to Change the World. Hunter was a journalist for the Vancouver Sun when he decided to pursue a more active…
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Feature: Corbucci vs. Tarantino
When Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight was released earlier this year, many pointed to director Sergio Leone as one of the central influences. Tarantino has often name-checked and sound-checked Leone: Kill Bill: Vol. 2 features a track lifted from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly and the first chapter of Inglorious Basterds is certainly an…
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Film Review: At Any Price
★★☆☆☆ Ramin Bahrani’s At Any Price (2012) has one of those bland three-word titles which bodes no good, yet the results are intriguing if uneven. The Whipples are a family of farmers but the industry has changed and competition is so fierce that the risk of failure looms close despite their obvious prosperity. Farmers sit…
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Film Review: Anomalisa
★★★★★ Charlie Kaufman and Duke Jones’ Anomalisa is a deep, witty and moving portrait of alienation filmed in stop-motion animation. It’s quite unlike anything else shown at Venice, or anywhere else for that matter, but if it helps: imagine Aardman Animation doing a Philip K. Dick adaptation. “What is it to be human?” asks Michael…
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DVD Review: ‘Listen to Me Marlon’
★★★★☆ “You’ve got to stop the movement from the popcorn to the mouth,” Marlon Brando says, speaking of the peak of movie acting. “You’ve got to get them to stop chewing.” At his best, Brando could do that. He was a movie actor for who was serially iconic and yet paradoxically detailed in his performances.…
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DVD Review: 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets
★★★★☆ A day after Thanksgiving 2012, now known to many as Black Friday, four teenagers stopped at the Gate Gas Station in Jacksonville, Florida to buy some cigarettes and gum. They were playing their music loudly and looking forward to a night cruising around and doing what teenagers do. When Michael Dunn, who had parked…
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DVD Review: ‘The Immortal Story’
★★★★☆ Made for French television in 1968, Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story is a beguiling and hypnotic meditation, on art and artifice, and the trickery and magic of storytelling. Adapted from a short story by Danish writer Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen), it tells the tale of an elderly and wealthy merchant Mr. Clay (Welles), who…