John Bleasdale

★★★★☆ Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf opened last year’s Venice Orizzonti sidebar with The President (2014), which attains the open force of a parable while at the same time maintaining the excitement and tension of a political thriller. Georgian actor Misha Gomiashvili plays the President of the title, who reigns over an unnamed country. His grandson (Dachi…

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★★★☆☆ Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was the Colombian drug lord par excellence. Ruling his own fiefdom of Medellín, he first made his money stealing gravestones and ended up, through kidnapping, murder and cocaine to be one of the wealthiest criminals in history, worth an estimated $30 billion at the height of his power in the…

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★★★★☆ David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), on Blu-ray this week through Arrow Video, sees the Canadian auteur at the peak of his pre- Hollywood career, angling subversive body horror into broader political and social commentary. The film starts of with the tone and feel of a paranoid thriller. In a brilliantly intense performance, James Woods plays…

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★★★★☆ A contender for last year’s Palme d’Or – if not the most deserving, according to its modest director – Naomi Kawase’s Still the Water (2014) is a fluid, dreamlike tone poem of mothers and fathers, death and continuance. Violent waves crash on the shore of the film’s Japanese island, sweeping to land the tattooed…

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★★★★★ The maturation of Charlie Chaplin’s genius both as a comic actor and film director can be appreciated in three DVD and Blu-ray releases from Curzon Artificial Eye, each film a masterpiece in cinematic hilarity. Having already earned himself a fortune and massive fame with his short films for Keystone, Essnay and Mutual studios, Chaplin…

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★★★★☆ Winner of three prizes in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar last year, Thomas Cailley’s debut feature Les Combattants is an expertly handled and brilliantly performed feel-good comedy with an original twist. Arnaud (Kévin Azaïs) is a mild-mannered, angst-free young man who’s looking forward to a summer hanging out with his friends and working with his…

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★★★☆☆ Just in case you thought fears of nuclear apocalypse were confined to the 1980s like leg warmers and aerobics, Tom Harper’s War Book (2014) presents a tense reminder of the risks we run with the nuclear stockpiles in the hands of governing classes of dubious morality, not least of all our own. It’s 2014…

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★★☆☆☆ In 2002 the CIA employed an armed drone in a targeted killing in Afghanistan and since then they have been used thousands of times. To their advocates they are a way of defeating a dangerous enemy without risking the lives of troops; to their critics they are a cowardly form of remote control killing…

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★★☆☆☆ With a homicidal big game hunter as its chief antagonist, Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s Beyond the Reach (2014) has a ripped from the headlines topicality, but unfortunately this plodding thriller consistently fails to engage. Michael Douglas plays John Madec, a high-flying finance mogul who likes to relax by taking trophies of wild, rare, if not actually…

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★★☆☆☆ Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton play Alex and Ruth Carver in Ruth & Alex (2014), a wistfully bland property-based dramedy that comes off as a cross between Location, Location, Location and On Golden Pond (1981). Alex is a struggling artist and Ruth is a retired teacher. Together they live in their Brooklyn apartment with…

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