John Bleasdale
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Film Review: ‘The Salt of the Earth’
★★★★☆ “Everyone should see these images to see how terrible out species is,” says Brazilian photography Sebastião Salgado as he reviews the photographs that he has taken throughout his career. It has been a career that has been inspired by an intense social conscience, a fierce and bold curiosity, and an eye for beauty and…
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DVD Review: ‘Still Alice’
★★★★☆ Dr. Alice Howland (Julianne Moore) is a linguist, someone who has made language acquisition her life’s work; she has literally written the book on the subject. She lives in New York with her busy doctor husband John (Alec Baldwin), teaches at Columbia, has a brood of adult children and a busy life of conferences…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Mona Lisa’
★★★★★ Mona Lisa, released in 1986 and written/directed by Irish poet and novelist Neil Jordan, shines out as a rough diamond, a masterpiece of British cinema undeniably worthy of its classical title. In one of the most powerful roles of his career, the late great Bob Hoskins stars as George, a low-level criminal who returns…
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Film Review: ‘Amy’
★★★★☆ Bafta-winning British director Asif Kapadia made his name with his brilliant 2012 biographic documentary Senna, which told the story of the young Brazilian race driver whose early death in a crash in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix made him into a tragic icon. With Amy (2015) – which premieried at Cannes and is…
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DVD Review: ‘It Follows’
★★★★☆ Boiling terror down to essentials can be a winning formula for horror films: the phone call in Scream (1996), or the video tape in The Ring (1998). Perhaps, the best example is John Carpenter’s 1982 remake The Thing, with its shape-shifting alien lurking amidst the blank spaces of Antarctica. With a similarly unspecific title,…
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Film Review: ‘Going Clear’
★★★★☆ Paul Haggis, director of the Oscar-winning Crash (2004), was a struggling young writer in a failing relationship when he first came across a man on a street corner offering self-help advice via a book called Dianetics. Written by pulp sci-fi author L. Ron Hubbard, the book had been a massive bestseller and led to…
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Film Review: ‘Everyone’s Going to Die’
★★☆☆☆ “I feel like I should say something important,” says Ray, the melancholic career criminal in the midst of a midlife crisis. This essential emptiness plagues, Everyone’s Going to Die, the visually shiny debut film from British collective ‘Jones’, which first premiered at Edinburgh in 2013 and is now in cinemas. Despite the dramatically apocalyptic…
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Film Review: ‘Timbuktu’
★★★★☆ “Tire it, don’t kill it,” shouts a hunter to his party as they pursue a gazelle across the desert plain in a jeep. The men let off sporadic shots with the assault rifles they will later use to rip apart the sculptures and effigies that represent a culture their new Islamic regime is trying…
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Cannes 2015: ‘The Wakhan Front’ review
★★★☆☆ A black dog lopes through an apparently empty camp amidst a lifeless landscape. This eerie intro to Clément Cogitore’s fascinatingly spooky The Wakhan Front (2015) recalls a dustier, low-key version of John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Playing in the Cannes Critics’ Week sidebar, The Wakhan Front tells the tale of a platoon of French…
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Cannes 2015: ‘The Treasure’ review
★★★☆☆ Romanian director Corneliu Porumboiu won the Un Certain Regard prize back in 2009 with his black comedy Police, Adjective. This year he entered the competition and picked up the Un Certain Talent prize with The Treasure (2015), a similarly wryly comic fable set in modern day Bucharest. Mild-mannered civil servant Costi (Cuzin Toma) is…