John Bleasdale
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Venice 2014: ‘Messi’ review
★☆☆☆☆ Messi (2014), a new film about diminutive Argentinian football icon Lionel Messi, has all the ingredients for a great sports documentary. A mass of archive material has been made available to director Álex de la Iglesia, apparently provided by Messi’s constantly videotaping father, there are interviews with influential figures in the player’s life including…
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Venice 2014: Read our Venezia 71 programme preview
This week, the world’s oldest and often most unpredictable film festival, the 71st Venice Film Festival, will unroll on the Lido. Twenty films will screen in competition, vying for the prestigious Golden Lion and a further fifty-odd films will show out of competition and in the various sidebars – all but one of which will…
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Film Review: ‘The Notorious Mr. Bout’
★★★☆☆ On 6 March 2008, Viktor Bout was arrested in Bangkok after having been recorded apparently selling arms to an alleged terrorist organisation, the Columbian FARC, and conniving in the murder of American citizens. He had already achieved an international level of notoriety as ‘The Merchant of Death’, an embargo buster, shady operator and arms…
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DVD Review: ‘Muppets Most Wanted’
★★★☆☆ It’s time to play the music. It’s time to light the lights. Everyone’s favourite felt-made, hand-operated, chaos-beleaguered variety act is back. Following the surprise success of the 2011 reboot, its follow-up – Muppets Most Wanted (2014) – reaches DVD and Blu-ray this week in a slicker, vaster, if marginally less satisfying caper. Just as…
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Film Review: ‘Joe’
★★★★☆ From the same director who brought us such eclectic offerings as George Washington (2000) and stoner comedy Pineapple Express (2008), David Gordon Green’s rural noir Joe (2013) – based on Larry Brown’s grit-lit novel – stars Nicolas Cage as Joe Ransom, a man who, in the words of Johnny Cash, “Won’t back down”. Joe…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films 1963-1974’
★★★★☆ The key scene in Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s cherished cinematic collaboration Last Year at Marienbad (1961) which was cut from the script was one of sexual violence, leaving the film with a lurking possibility of menace but nothing explicit to challenge its ‘U’ certificate. Sadism and particularly sexual sadism was to be a…
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Film Review: Secret Sharer
★★☆☆☆ Based on the 1909 short story by Heart of Darkness scribe Joseph Conrad, Peter Fudakowski’s debut feature film Secret Sharer (2014) is a handsomely made romantic drama which is ultimately sunk by its own clichés. Jack Laskey plays Konrad (a nod to the Polish author here) a young seaman, driven by his own ambition…
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Film Review: ‘Cold in July’
★★★☆☆ Based on the 1989 novel by Joe R. Lansdale, Jim Mickle’s Cold in July (2014) is an entertaining Southern noir with a distinctly eighties feel. An intruder breaking and entering into a family home, wakes passive family man and framer Richard Dane, played by a mullet sporting, post- Dexter Michael C. Hall. Richard protective…
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Film Review: ‘Miss Violence’
★☆☆☆☆ “We don’t have secrets in this family,” Themis Panou’s repulsive pater familias – who bears an uncanny resemblance to Donald Pleasance – states in Alexandros Avranas’ Miss Violence (2013), the baffling winner of several awards at last year’s 70th Venice Film Festival. However, when it comes to families in this kind of drama, nothing…
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Film Review: ‘Grace of Monaco’
★☆☆☆☆ The much-maligned opening film of this year’s Cannes Film Festival was the geographically apposite Grace of Monaco (2014), starring Nicole Kidman as the Philadelphia-born Hollywood actress who married a prince. The film begins with a quote from Grace Kelly herself: “The idea of my life as a fairytale is itself a fairytale.” Anyone hoping…
