Film Review: ‘Beasts of No Nation’
★★★★☆ There’s a scene halfway through Cary Fukunaga’s adaptation of Uzodinma Iweala’s harrowing novel Beasts of No Nation (2015) – currently in select cinemas...
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: ‘The Look of Silence’
★★★★★ “You ask deeper questions than Joshua” states one of the killers in Joshua Oppenheimer and his anonymous collaborators’ documentary The Look of Silence...
DVD Review: ‘The Cut’
★★★☆☆ Medz Yeghern is the synonym Armenians gave to the brutal extermination of their people by the Ottoman Empire from 1915 to the end...
Film Review: Sicario
★★★★☆ Denis Villeneuve, the Canadian director behind Prisoners (2013) and Enemy (2014), returns with Sicario (2015), a bleak, powerful and beautifully realised trip to...
Blu-ray Review: ‘Chaplin Collection: Vol. 3’
★★★★☆ That the onset of sound in cinema was going to be a problem for Charlie Chaplin, no one appreciated more than the little...
Film Review: ‘Macbeth’
★★★★☆ By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes – namely Snowtown director Justin Kurzel’s visually inventive take on the Scottish...
Film Review: ‘By Our Selves’
★★☆☆☆ “John Clare was a minor nature poet, who went mad,” voices repeat as a challenging refrain throughout Andrew Kötting’s By Our Selves (2015),...
DVD Review: ‘Anarchy’
★★☆☆☆ Belonging to that wonky sub-genre of William Shakespeare’s commonly works known as the ‘problem plays’, Michael Almereyda’s Anarchy (2014) is an intriguingly off-the-wall...
