John Bleasdale

★★★☆☆ This has been the year of the tragic music star documentary. Brett Morgen’s Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) might have underwhelmed but Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015), which premièred at Cannes, was a powerful demonstration of how the form could reveal previously unsuspected depths of emotion behind the tabloid headlines. Tragic chanteuse Janis Joplin has…

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★☆☆☆☆ Daniel Alfredson’s appallingly bland backwoods drama Go With Me (2015) stars Anthony Hopkins as ex-logger Lester, who comes to the aid of harassed waitress Lillian (Julia Stiles). While Lester spends his evenings making garden ornaments in memory of his dead wife, Lillian is redecorating her dead mother’s house. Trouble lurks in the hedgerows via…

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★★☆☆☆ Following a Malickian break between films – his debut Round the Moons Between Earth and Sea was released in 1997 – Giuseppe M. Gaudino tells with For Your Love (2015), the final entry to compete for the Golden Lion at the 72nd Venice Film Festival, a tale of ordinary madness told in an extraordinary…

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★★★★☆ China is the largest coal consumer in the world. The electricity derived from the coal-fuelled power stations drives the huge economic growth of the past decades. At the current rate of consumption it looks unlikely that the coalfields, which contain 13% of the coal in the world, will last much longer. The environmental and…

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★★☆☆☆ “What do you miss about mum?” Rose (Zamira Fuller) the youngest daughter of three asks her father, Dee (Muhammet Uzuner). “I used to swim in her wake,” he says. Screening in the Critic’s Week sidebar at the Venice Film Festival, British writer director Esther Campbell’s first feature Light Years (2015) is a meditation on…

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★★★★☆ Debuting in the Orizzonti sidebar at this year’s 72nd Venice Film Festival, August Winds (2014) director Gabriel Mascaro’s Neon Bull (2015) tells a bizarre and sensuous story of a team of bull handlers in a remote corner of Brazil. They go from town to town in a large HGV with the bulls which they…

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★★☆☆☆ Heart of a Dog (2015) is the second film in competition at Venice that is essentially an illustrated director’s monologue. Whereas Aleksandr Sokurov’s Francofonia (2015) had an ambitious if indulgent breadth, artist and musician Laurie Anderson focuses her film on her rat-terrier Lolabelle and offers a work of such ephemeral whimsy that it should…

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★★★☆☆ Noah Baumbach and Jake Paltrow’s unpretentious documentary De Palma (2015) reveals a clear-sighted and fascinating director, who often seems as bemused by the vagaries and inconsistencies in his own career as everyone else. Brian De Palma was initially seen as the most talented of the Young Turks who came to prominence in the seventies.…

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★★★☆☆ Last time he was on the Venice Lido, Jerzy Skolimowski was chasing Vincent Gallo through the snow in 2010’s wordless survival picture Essential Killing. This year he enters the race for the Golden Lion with a film that smacks more of a precocious 17-year-old arriviste rather than a director of some 77 years. 11…

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★★★☆☆ In Emin Alper’s sophomore film Frenzy (2015), two brothers look to survive the paranoia, terror and repression of a frantically unstable Turkey. Mehmet Ozgur plays Kadir, a lumbering giant of a man with a constant expression of docile worry. He is released on parole in return for becoming as an informer to the Turkish…

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