DVD Review: ‘Listen to Me Marlon’
★★★★☆ “You’ve got to stop the movement from the popcorn to the mouth,” Marlon Brando says, speaking of the peak of movie acting. “You’ve...
Film Reviews & More
Most Recent. In John Bleasdale.
6 September 2024
Film Review: Firebrand
★★☆☆☆ “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king,” Percy Shelley once wrote in his sonnet England in 1819. He was firing his barbs at King George III but the words could just as well be used for any number of English monarchs including Henry VIII.
26 July 2024
Film Review: About Dry Grasses
★★★★★ Turkish master director Nuri Bilge Ceylan returns to the Cannes Croisette with About Dry Grasses, a wonderful wintry meditation on male fragility and the way we often make our own hells and then deceive ourselves that we’re trapped.
21 June 2024
Film Review: Green Border
★★★★☆ From sub-Saharan Africa to Afghanistan, Syria to Iraq and Iran, the climate crisis, drought, war, and oppression has created a humanitarian crisis of epic proportions. It is treated as an ethical conundrum, but it isn’t. Either we wish to save those who are in danger of dying, or all our talk of human rights is just so much hot air. This is the core concern of Green Border.
John Bleasdale
DVD Review: 3½ Minutes, Ten Bullets
★★★★☆ A day after Thanksgiving 2012, now known to many as Black Friday, four teenagers stopped at the Gate Gas Station in Jacksonville, Florida...
DVD Review: ‘The Immortal Story’
★★★★☆ Made for French television in 1968, Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story is a beguiling and hypnotic meditation, on art and artifice, and the...
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...
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....
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)...
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...
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...
