John Bleasdale
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Film Review: ‘Black Souls’
★★★☆☆ Francesco Munzi’s Black Souls (2014) is a grimly serious family tragedy centred around the feuds within the Calabrian equivalent of the mafia, the ‘Ndrangheta. The drama begins in Amsterdam where a business deal is going down between mob boss Luigi (Marco Leonardi) and some Spanish, or South American partners. It doesn’t really matter which…
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DVD Review: ‘Theeb’
★★★★☆ “Only two kinds of creature get fun in the desert. Bedouins and gods”, the exquisitely cynical diplomat Mr. Dryden (Claude Rains) tells T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole) in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia (1962), “and you’re neither.” He could have added a third category of desert tourists: directors. The desert is a supremely photogenic location…
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DVD Review: ‘Cartel Land’
★★★★☆ The Mexican drug trade and its impact on the US has been documented in several films and shows from Steven Soderbergh’s Traffic (2000) and Ridley Scott’s The Counsellor (2013) to Breaking Bad and most recently Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario (2015). The sense of hopelessness in the face of almost unimaginable brutality powered by the logic of…
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Film Review: ‘The Black Panthers’
★★★☆☆ “The strength of the Black Panther Party was its youth, its idealism and its enthusiasm,” says an aging member towards the close of Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution (2015). “The weakness of the Black Panther Party was its youth, its idealism and its enthusiasm.” This tragic see-saw, which sees revolutionary enthusiasm digging the…
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Film Review: ‘Howl’
★★★☆☆ “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by werewolf movies.” Okay, wrong Howl perhaps, but aside from An American Werewolf in London (1981) and the genre-twisting The Company of Wolves (1984), the werewolf has probably been the patchiest movie monster to prowl the cinema. Since Lon Chaney Jr. first growled at the…
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Film Review: ‘Beasts of No Nation’
★★★★☆ There’s a scene halfway through Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s harrowing novel Beasts of No Nation (2015) – currently in select cinemas and on Netflix from 16 October – where a mother and her daughter are dragged from their hiding places, raped and killed while our protagonist Agu (a stunning performance from Abraham…
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DVD Review: ‘The Look of Silence’
★★★★★ “You ask deeper questions than Joshua” states one of the killers in Joshua Oppenheimer and his anonymous collaborators’ documentary The Look of Silence (2014). The film is a companion piece to Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2013), which revealed not only the mass murder of over one million suspected communists in a wave of…
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DVD Review: ‘The Cut’
★★★☆☆ Medz Yeghern is the synonym Armenians gave to the brutal extermination of their people by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to the end of First World War, which also gave a new word to the English language – ‘genocide’, coined by Raphael Lemkin. Also known as the Armenian Holocaust, the state-sponsored murders were widely…
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Film Review: Sicario
★★★★☆ Denis Villeneuve, the Canadian director behind Prisoners (2013) and Enemy (2014), returns with Sicario (2015), a bleak, powerful and beautifully realised trip to hell. It’s a significant film – a French Connection (1971) for the drug-fuelled Mexico-US border war – full of pessimism, moral ambiguity and tension. With a ponytail and dressed-down intensity, Emily…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Chaplin Collection: Vol. 3’
★★★★☆ That the onset of sound in cinema was going to be a problem for Charlie Chaplin, no one appreciated more than the little tramp himself. For several years he persisted in making essentially silent film or for the best part wordless films – i.e. City Lights (1931) and Modern Times (1936) – with sound…