John Bleasdale

★★★★☆ Ognjen Svilicic’s These Are the Rules (2014) is a modest work of quiet desperation, but it’s obvious restraint and slow unwinding has a powerful, unsettling and ultimately moving effect. Middle-aged bus driver Ivo (Emir Hadžihafizbegović) lives with his wife Maja (Jasna Žalica) in a tidy, if dreary high rise apartment. It is a life…

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★★☆☆☆ Saverio Costanzo returns to Venice in competition with his second film, Hungry Hearts (2014), a claustrophobic drama about a young couple and their conflicting views on parenting. Adam Driver plays Jude (Thomas Hardy would be a good point of reference here), a lanky engineer living in New York. He meets Mina (Alba Rohrwacher), an…

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★★☆☆☆ Director Benoît Jacquot returns to the Venice Lido with Three Hearts (2014), a slickly presented and thespy relationship drama which flounders on its own lack of originality, humourlessness and absence of credibility. Marc (Benoît Poelvoorde, in his second film of the festival), a tax inspector from Paris, misses his train and finds himself trapped…

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★★★★★ Adapted from the Albert Camus short story The Guest, David Oelhoffen’s second feature Far From Men (2014), a handsomely shot drama set during the Algerian War of Independence, joined the race for the Golden Lion at Venice 2014. Following his Spanish language Cannes entry Jauja (2014) earlier this year, multi-lingual Viggo Mortensen essays the…

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★★★☆☆ David Gordon Green has to have one of the most eclectic directorial résumés of recent times. From stoner comedies like Pineapple Express (2008) and Your Highness (2011) to his work on hit TV show Eastbound & Down and striking debut George Washington (2000), Green has graduated into spiky character studies of Americans leading lives…

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★★☆☆☆ When Ulrich Seidl unveiled plans to make a documentary on everyday Austrians and their relationships with their basements, almost everyone jumped to the conclusion that this would be about Joseph Fritzl. In the Basement (2014), which screened out of competition at the Venice Film Festival this week, makes no mention of Fritzl, even though…

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★★★★☆ Old-fashioned Hollywood pizazz arrived at the Venice Film Festival this year in the form of Peter Bogdanovich’s delightful, zinger-filled farce She’s Funny That Way (2014). Owen Wilson stars as protag Arnold Patterson, a director preparing a play for Broadway. The night before casting begins, Arnold – using the name Dennis – calls up an…

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★★★★☆ Festival favourite Ramin Bahrani returns to the Venice Lido with 99 Homes (2014), a dramatic thriller set at the sharp-end of the housing crisis. The very first shot shows that there is blood on the bathroom walls of America. The recent economic travails are not just some victimless white collar larks – Margin Call…

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★★★☆☆ Entering the race for the prestigious Golden Lion prize at this year’s 71st Venice Film Festival, Iranian director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad’s Tales (Ghesse-ha, 2014) presents the interlocking lives of several disparate Iranians trying to make sense of modern day Iran; imagine a Shortcuts set in Tehran and with a predominantly female cast. A documentary filmmaker…

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★☆☆☆☆ When Charlie Chaplin died on Christmas Day in 1977, the whole world paid tribute to the passing of a comic genius. However, two down-on-their luck, unemployed immigrants living in Switzerland saw his passing as an opportunity – the answer to all their problems – and hatched a plan to dig up and steal his…

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