Venice 2015: ‘A Monster with a Thousand Heads’ review
★★★☆☆ Opening the Orizzonti (Horizons) sidebar at the 72nd Venice Film Festival today, A Monster with a Thousand Heads (2015) is a witty and...
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
Venice 2015: Read our Venice 72 preview
The 72nd Venice Film Festival will run from the 2-12 September and promises one of the hottest line ups for years. The already announced...
DVD Review Queen & Country
★★★☆☆ Queen & Country (2014), which screened in the Director’s Fortnight sidebar at Cannes last year, is the second part of John Boorman’s filmic...
DVD Review: ‘Eyes Without a Face’
★★★★☆ If you only know Eyes Without a Face (1960) from the Billy Idol rock ballad, then you are in for a treat. Georges...
Blu-ray Review: ‘Chaplin Collection: Vol. 2’
★★★★★ City Lights (1931) begins with a scene of splendour as the gathered dignitaries and the jubilant crowd attend the unveiling of a new...
Film Review: ‘The President’
★★★★☆ Iranian Mohsen Makhmalbaf opened last year’s Venice Orizzonti sidebar with The President (2014), which attains the open force of a parable while at...
Film Review: ‘Escobar: Paradise Lost’
★★★☆☆ Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was the Colombian drug lord par excellence. Ruling his own fiefdom of Medellín, he first made his money stealing...
Blu-ray Review: ‘Videodrome’
★★★★☆ David Cronenberg’s Videodrome (1983), on Blu-ray this week through Arrow Video, sees the Canadian auteur at the peak of his pre- Hollywood career,...
