John Bleasdale
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Cannes 2015: ‘The Little Prince’ review
★★☆☆☆ On 30 December 1935, aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, along with his copilot, crashed in the Sahara desert while trying to break a speed record. Although they survived the crash, the ordeal had only begun and several days of dehydration, scorching heat, and subsequent hallucinations were undergone in the desert before they were…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Dope’ review
★★★★☆ Fresh from a successful bow at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, Rick Famuyiwa’s Dope (2015) hit the Director’s Fortnight sidebar at Cannes to resounding praise from the critical circuit. It’s a hip–hop remix of the kind of high school comedy that John Hughes cut his teeth on in the Eighties; a Ferris…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Alias María’ review
★★★☆☆ Showing in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes, Colombian director José Luis Rugeles’ sophomore effort Alias María (2015) is a tense thriller about a child soldier’s attempt to survive war and pregnancy in the jungle. Deep in the Colombian bush a group of freedom fighters are given their regular check up by the…
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Cannes 2015: Love review
★★★☆☆ Trailing poster-fuelled controversy and its French director’s reputation as an arch provocateur, Gaspar Noé’s NSFW 3D erotica Love (2015) was the most midnight of midnight movies at Cannes this year. The film tells the tale of a love affair played out by the only two twentysomethings in the western hemisphere without tattoos. Electra (Aomi…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Youth’ review
★★★☆☆ Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (2015), his latest meditation on aging, memory and mortality, premièred at Cannes in competition today to assorted cheers and boos. This review is going to fall somewhere between the two. Retired composer Fred Ballinger (Michael Caine) is spending his holiday undergoing a variety of health treatments in a spa resort in…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Mountains May Depart’ review
★★★☆☆ Following his well-regarded A Touch of Sin (2013), which played in Cannes a couple of years ago, Jia Zhang-ke is back in competition with a new three-part drama, Mountains May Depart (2015). Each section takes on a different period in time starting in 1999. China is moving toward the new millennium with confidence and…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Marguerite & Julien’ review
★★☆☆☆ The second French actress turned director to enter the Palme d’Or race, Valérie Donzelli brings to Cannes an overwrought, overblown raspberry of a literary bromance in Marguerite & Julien (2015). When Baz Luhrmann made his adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, he signalled his intention to remix the Bard’s tale of star-crossed lovers by replacing…
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Film Review: Cemetery of Splendour
★★★☆☆ Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul came to prominence in 2010 when he won the Palme d’Or for Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Now he’s back with a new film in the Un Certain Regard sidebar: the enigmatic and sleepy Cemetery of Splendour (2015). While working on a building project for the government,…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Green Room’ review
★★★★☆ Jeremy Saulnier’s follows up Blue Ruin (2014) with the gloriously entertaining Green Room (2015), a siege movie that pits pit bulls and murderous Neo-Nazis against a young punk band. The Ain’t Rights are a punk band touring the country and desperate for money and gigs. They syphon gas from parked cars and scrounge anything…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Maryland’ review
★★☆☆☆ Screening in the Un Certain Regard sidebar at Cannes, Parisian director Alice Winocour’s Maryland (aka Disorder, 2015) is a neat little thriller which unfortunately never achieves plausibility. Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts – most widely seen in Rust and Bone (2012) and The Drop (2014) – plays Vincent, a soldier with some medical problems who…