John Bleasdale
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Korean Film Festival: ‘Pieta’ review
★★★★☆ Set in the Cheonggyecheon district of Seoul City, acclaimed South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, Pieta (2012), tells the story of Kang-do (Lee Jung-jin), a loan shark debt collector, who – when his clients can’t or won’t pay – resorts to crippling them in one way or another and cashing the insurance claims…
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DVD Review: ‘The Golden Dream’
★★★☆☆ Diego Quemada-Díez’s debut film The Golden Dream (2013) so impressed at Cannes in 2013 that it received a special award and fulsome praise from Ken Loach. It tells the simple and familiar story of three young Guatemalans who decide to leave their homeland and travel through Mexico towards the ‘dream’ of the United States.…
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Film Review: ‘Birdman’
★★★★★ Last year, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) wowed audiences with its bravura setpieces and technical prowess, taking us into space and back down to earth again. This year, London’s Surprise Film is Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman (2014) (or The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), who trumps his fellow countryman with a film that for the most…
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Film Review: ‘Filmed in Supermarionation’
★★★☆☆ ‘The Swinging Sixties. Great Britain. Slough’. Perhaps not the most enticing sequence of title cards, but one that gives a perfect indication of the dry humour and charm of this nostalgic and affectionate look at the team that brought us the likes of Captain Scarlet, Stingray and Thunderbirds. For director Stephen La Rivière, this…
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DVD Review: ‘The Great British Train Robbery’
★★☆☆☆ Early on a Thursday morning in the depths of the Buckinghamshire countryside, the Travelling Post Office train en route to London Euston stopped at a red signal. The engineer and train driver Jack Mills were overpowered, with Mills being clubbed by one of the fifteen robbers attacking the train. The carriage holding the valuable…
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Film Review: ‘Human Capital’
★★☆☆☆ The financial crisis has hit Italy particularly hard and laid bare the structural defects of a country in serious need of reform, to the extent that even now it’s floundering in a triple-dip recession while other European countries slowly, painfully recover. Announced this week as the Italian candidate for the Best Foreign Language Film…
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Film Review: ‘Pride’
★★★★☆ Following the minor disappointment of Ken Loach’s somewhat lethargic Jimmy’s Hall (2014), left-leaning political activism returns to UK cinemas, but this time in the much livelier and fun-filled exuberance of Matthew Warchus’ Queer Palm-winning agit-comedy Pride (2014). It’s 1984, in the depths of the miners’ strikes, and gay activist Mark Ashton (Ben Schnetzer) is…
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Venice 2014: Andersson’s ‘Pigeon’ is a Golden Lion
Surprisingly given the encroachment of the Toronto International Film Festival and the ongoing rivalry with Cannes, the Venice Film Festival still manages to provide a top quality programme. Although there were definitely some notable absences this year – Paul Thomas Anderson for one – the dearth of blockbuster fare allowed room for a much more…
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Venice 2014: ‘The Postman’s White Nights’
★★★★☆ If Anton Chekhov had been a reality show creator, Andrei Konchalovsky’s The Postman’s White Nights (2014) might well have been the result. Playing in competition at the 71st Venice Film Festival, this beautifully realised picture tells the story of a small, marginalised village in Northern Russia on the banks of Lake Kenozero. Using for…
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Venice 2014: ‘La Trattativa’ review
★★☆☆☆ During the early nineties a series of bombings rocked the cities of Italy. The violence was a response by the Mafia to a political class of socialists and Christian democrats who had come to power via their influence but who were now doing nothing to halt a publicly supported crusade against organised crime. This…