John Bleasdale
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DVD Review: ‘Effie Gray’
★★★☆☆ Euphemia ‘Effie’ Gray was just twelve years old when esteemed Victorian art critic and writer John Ruskin wrote a novel for her called The King of the Golden River. It was a fable and the fairy tale looked like having a happy ending when some seven years later, Ruskin and Effie married, but things…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Clouds of Sils Maria’ review
★★★☆☆ Meditations on art, mortality and performance are the lofty thematics explored in Clouds of Sils Maria (2014), a discursive drama from French director Olivier Assayas which features two exceptional performances from Juliette Binoche and Kristen Stewart. Binoche plays Maria Enders, an established and world famous actress who, twenty years prior, was made famous by…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Wild Tales’ review
★★★☆☆ One of this year’s Best Foreign Language Film Academy Award hopefuls, Argentinian director Damián Szifron’s Wild Tales (2014) is an exuberant, obsidian-black comedy of violence and vengeance. Divided into a series of isolated sketches, each one tells a short story about how quickly madness can rip through the vestiges of civilisation with the appropriate…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘Red Army’ review
★★★★☆ If you thought ice hockey was just Canadians and punch-ups, then Gabe Polsky’s documentary Red Army (2014) may come as a cool eye-opener. Featuring candid interviews with the surviving members of the Soviet Union team, as well as chunky 1970s-80s footage with some slick graphics thrown in, Polsky paints a vivid picture not only…
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Glasgow 2015: ‘A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence’
★★★★☆ Tragedy says “We all die”, whilst comedy says “Ah, but life goes on”. The winner of last year’s Golden Lion, Roy Andersson’s first feature film in seven years – the brilliantly titled existential comedy A Pigeon Sat on a Branch Reflecting on Existence (2014) – is essentially a tragi-comedy which says “We all die and…
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Film Review: ‘Amour Fou’
★★★★☆ Jessica Hausner’s Amour Fou (2014) has enjoyed considerable praise since it premiered in the Un Certain Regard section back at the Cannes Film Festival last May and is a quietly effective denunciation of the idea of dying for love. It’s a reserved period piece, but as with her brilliant Lourdes (2009) it’s Hausner’s restraint that ends up…
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Film Review: ‘Son of a Gun’
★★☆☆☆ Julius Avery’s debut feature Son of a Gun (2014) starts promisingly in a maximum security prison where young JR (rising star Brenton Thwaites) has been sentenced to six months for some petty offence or another. The jail looks like a reformed and spruced-up version of John Hillcoat’s Ghosts…of the Civil Dead (1988) but here…
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Film Review: ‘Point and Shoot’
★★☆☆☆ Point and Shoot (2014) is a bizarrely fascinating documentary, recording the adventures of Matt VanDyke, a young American from Baltimore who ended up fighting in and filming the war in Libya that saw the overthrow of Col. Moammar Gadhafi. With a extensive use of his own footage and some animation and talking head interviews,…
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Film Review: ‘Foxcatcher’
★★★★★ When Barton Fink was asked to write a wrestling picture, it struck him as the most demeaning use of his talents. He wished to commit to his political principles, and to the people. With Bennett Miller’s Foxcatcher (2014), we have a film which, despite devoting significant screentime to the sport of large men in tights,…
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Film Review: The Homesman
★★★★☆ Tommy Lee Jones’ second directorial effort following the underrated The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (which played at Cannes in 2005), The Homesman (2014) is something of a reverse western, with homesteader Mary Bee Cuddy (a sterling turn from Hilary Swank) and amoral old-timer George Briggs (Jones) heading from west to east with a…