John Bleasdale

★★★★☆ When Sean Connery agreed to return to play James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever (1971), as a sweetener United Artists offered to finance two pictures of Connery’s choosing. One of those pictures was Sidney Lumet’s The Offence (1972), a gritty police drama about a detective sergeant (Connery) who beats to death a suspected child…

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★★☆☆☆ Released today on DVD, Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (2014) stars Amy Adams as Margaret Keane (née Ulbrich), a woman we first encounter on the brink of divorce. It’s the late 1950s and, with her daughter in tow, Margaret forsakes the colour-coded conformity of suburbia for a new life in the big city, painting furniture…

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★★☆☆☆ The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) is a bizarre remake/sequel hybrid of the 1976 film of the same name. That film, directed by Charles B. Pierce, recounted the real life murders attributed to a serial killer called ‘The Phantom’ who haunted the streets of Texarkana, located on the border of Texas and Arkansas and…

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★★★★☆ Maidan Nezalezhnosti is a square in the centre of Kiev in Ukraine. It gained its name – literally translated as Independence Square – in 1991, following the collapse of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s subsequent declaration of independence. It has been a focal point for protest and dissent, forming the fire point for the…

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★★★☆☆ Ryan Gosling makes a return to cinema screens – this time in the director’s chair – with his first feature film Lost River (2014), a dark fantasy of a family living in a ghost town to be. The film was largely dismissed by critics upon its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, yet there’s…

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★★☆☆☆ Better Things director Duane Hopkins’ second feature, Bypass (2014), is a stylistically overblown tale from the lower echelons of crime and economic hardship. The first ten minutes or so follow Greg (Benjamin Dilloway), a young man whose football career was terminated by a brutal injury. All he has left are the memories and a…

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★★★☆☆ Even for a Nazi, Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a monumentally unattractive person. With his pencil neck, his weak watery eyes, his Touché Turtle expression of prissy blandness, a less convincing example of Hitler’s theories of racial superiority would be difficult to find. That this apparently feeble specimen could wreak such obscene and widespread damage,…

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★★★★☆ Dystopias are usually set in a tweaked present rather than a distant future. 1984 is simply 1948, the year of its composition, writ backwards. And so it is with Norman Jewison’s Rollerball (1975), a gloriously entertaining dystopian thriller, set in the futuristic seventies. Nation states have been abolished and the world is run by…

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★★★★★ “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” So screams deranged anchorman Howard Beale. However, it’s a different kind of rage which infuses Sidney Lumet’s Network (1976) – a crystalline, precise, witty, world-weary and utterly heartfelt rage, making the film one of the best works of satire committed to…

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★★★★★ Prodigious Canadian director Xavier Dolan returned to Cannes last year with his most accomplished film to date, the marvellously cinematic spectacle Mommy (2014), which now arrives on British screens. Set in Canada in 2015, where laws have been changed to make it easier for parents to institutionalise their problem children, Steve (Antoine-Olivier Pilon) is…

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