John Bleasdale
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Film Review: Spotlight
★★★★☆ Playing out of competition at this year’s Venice Film Festival, Spotlight (2015) is a gripping drama able to stand alongside Alan J. Pakula’s All the President’s Men and a welcome return to form for director Tom McCarthy following the abhorrence that was The Cobbler (2014). Set in The Boston Globe newsrooms, it’s a meticulously…
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Venice 2015: ‘Looking for Grace’ review
★★★☆☆ Cut-up family tragicomedy Looking for Grace (2015) is Sue Brooks’ fifth feature film and premièred in competition at the Venice Film Festival today. Odessa Young plays Grace, a young girl who for motives unknown has decided to go walkabout with her friends Sapph (Kenya Pearson). Travelling across West Australia on a bus, they meet…
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Venice 2015: ‘Francofonia’ review
★★★★☆ The last time Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov was on the Lido he won the Golden Lion with his boisterous and vivid interpretation of Goethe’s Faust (2011). In the running once more for the top price at the 72nd Venice Film Festival, Francofonia (2015) is a chatty and occasionally brilliant rumination on art, history and…
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Venice 2015: ‘Black Mass’ review
★★★☆☆ After his portrayal of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger in Michael Mann’s Public Enemies (2009), Johnny Depp returns to the criminal underworld with his take on James ‘Whitey’ Bulger in Scott Cooper’s glossy, competent yet strangely unengaging Black Mass (2015). Adapted from the book by Dick Leher, Cooper’s film tells the story of the…
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Venice 2015: ‘Everest’ review
★★★☆☆ In 1996, Kiwi Rob Hall and his company Adventure Consultants took a team of climbers along with a group of paying clients to Kathmandu with the hope of reaching the summit of the world’s highest mountain on 10 May. The disaster that subsequently occurred was recorded in memoirs by several of the survivors, most…
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Venice 2015: ‘A Monster with a Thousand Heads’ review
★★★☆☆ Opening the Orizzonti (Horizons) sidebar at the 72nd Venice Film Festival today, A Monster with a Thousand Heads (2015) is a witty and efficient drama from Rodrigo Plá about a woman pushed to the edge by bureaucracy and an indifferent society. Jan Raluy plays the woman in question, Sonia Bonet. Her husband has cancer…
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Venice 2015: Read our Venice 72 preview
The 72nd Venice Film Festival will run from the 2-12 September and promises one of the hottest line ups for years. The already announced opening film, Baltasar Kormákur’s Everest, continues the start big philosophy of Gravity and Birdman of the previous two years. Johnny Depp’s return to ‘proper’ acting, Black Mass, has also already been…
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DVD Review Queen & Country
★★★☆☆ Queen & Country (2014), which screened in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar at Cannes last year, is the second part of John Boorman’s filmic memoir, following on directly from his 1987 Best Picture Oscar nominee Hope & Glory. It’s 1952: ten years on since the Nazis dropped a bomb on a school causing the kids…
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DVD Review: ‘Eyes Without a Face’
★★★★☆ If you only know Eyes Without a Face (1960) from the Billy Idol rock ballad, then you are in for a treat. Georges Franju’s Gallic body horror is a complex atmospheric chiller which balances graphic shocks with subtle characterisation. A woman Louise (Alida Valli) drives through the French countryside at night. In the backseat,…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Chaplin Collection: Vol. 2’
★★★★★ City Lights (1931) begins with a scene of splendour as the gathered dignitaries and the jubilant crowd attend the unveiling of a new monument, a group of statues personifying valour, industry and justice. As the nattering speeches finish and the veil is finally drawn a slumbering figure is revealed: Charlie Chaplin’s Tramp, using the…