John Bleasdale
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Cannes 2015: ‘Louder Than Bombs’ review
★★★☆☆ Following the acclaimed Reprise (2006) and Oslo, August 31st (2011), anticipation was high for Joachim Trier’s English language debut, the family drama Louder Than Bombs (2015). Unfortunately, the accompanying blast of reaction following its Cannes premiere wasn’t as clamorous as expected. In fact, it could barely be heard. Gabriel Byrne plays Gene, a teacher…
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Cannes 2015: ‘The Sea of Trees’ review
★★☆☆☆ My Own Private Idaho and Drugstore Cowboy director Gus Van Sant competes for the Palme d’Or with The Sea of Trees (2015), a tediously slick melodrama of staggering foolishness and mawkish gall. Matthew McConaughey stars as Arthur Bryant, a suicidal American who travels to Japan and the almost legendary Aokigaharam, the forest also known…
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Film Review: The Tribe
★★★★☆ A title card at the beginning of Myroslav Slaboshpytskiy’s incredible debut feature The Tribe explains that the entire film is in sign language and there will be no voiceover and no subtitles. For that matter, there will be no audible spoken dialogue. We are immersed in the world of the deaf, but we are…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Irrational Man’ review
★★☆☆☆ Woody Allen returns to his beloved Cannes with his story of crime and punishment in a sleepy up-state town, Irrational Man (2015), which was screened this morning to press outside of the main competition. Joaquin Phoenix plays Abe, a maudlin philosophy professor who, following his umpteenth scandal, finds himself teaching at a backwoods college.…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Tale of Tales’ review
★★★★☆ Once upon a time, fairytales were folk tales. Then they became children’s stories, were made into Disney cartoons and now star Angelina Jolie or Charlize Theron. Into the woods (and in competition at the Cannes Film Festival) strides Matteo Garrone’s Tale of Tales (2015), an anthology of 17th century folk tales by Giambattista Basile…
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Cannes 2015: ‘Our Little Sister’ review
★★★☆☆ Japanese director and Cannes favourite Hirokazu Kore-eda enters the race for the Palme d’Or with Our Little Sister (Umimachi Diary, 2015), adapted from the Akimi Yoshida’s manga. It tells the story of three grown women who live in their late grandmother’s house and fend for themselves, as if a version of the family from…
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Cannes 2015: ‘An’ review
★★★☆☆ “Everything in the world has a story to tell,” explains a character in Japanese director Naomi Kawase’s new film An (Sweet Red Bean Paste, 2015), which opened the Un Certain Regard sidebar here at the 68th Cannes Film Festival earlier today. Sentaro (Masatoshi Nagase) is the manager of a small bakery which specialises in…
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Cannes 2015: Our picks of the Competition programme
It’s that time of year again when the enormous poster outside the grand Palais is unveiled and, for this year at least, the beautiful face of Ingrid Bergman will glance down at the red carpet, ready for the opening of the 68th edition of the most glamorous film showcase in the world, Cannes. Over ten…
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DVD Review: ‘The Last Act’
★★★★☆ The shrouded world of the stage proved very much the theme of last year’s Venice Film Festival. Director Barry Levinson’s Philip Roth adaptation The Last Act (2014) is a bird of an entirely different feather to the screwball antics of She’s Funny That Way (2014) or the anarchic brio of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman…
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DVD Review: ‘Zulu’
★★☆☆☆ Bizarrely selected as closing film of the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, French director Jérôme Salle’s ultra-generic South African cop thriller Zulu (2013) – starring Forest Whitaker, Orlando Bloom and over one hundred grating clichés – finds its way onto DVD this week. Whitaker plays Captain Ali, a rigorous and by-the-books police officer who is…