DVD Review: ‘Still the Water’
★★★★☆ A contender for last year’s Palme d’Or – if not the most deserving, according to its modest director – Naomi Kawase’s Still the...
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
Blu-ray Review: ‘Chaplin Collection: Vol. 1’
★★★★★ The maturation of Charlie Chaplin’s genius both as a comic actor and film director can be appreciated in three DVD and Blu-ray releases...
DVD Review: Les Combattants
★★★★☆ Winner of three prizes in the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight sidebar last year, Thomas Cailley’s debut feature Les Combattants is an expertly handled and brilliantly...
Film Review: ‘War Book’
★★★☆☆ Just in case you thought fears of nuclear apocalypse were confined to the 1980s like leg warmers and aerobics, Tom Harper’s War Book...
DVD Review: ‘Good Kill’
★★☆☆☆ In 2002 the CIA employed an armed drone in a targeted killing in Afghanistan and since then they have been used thousands of...
Film Review: ‘Beyond the Reach’
★★☆☆☆ With a homicidal big game hunter as its chief antagonist, Jean-Baptiste Léonetti’s Beyond the Reach (2014) has a ripped from the headlines topicality,...
Film Review: Ruth & Alex
★★☆☆☆ Morgan Freeman and Diane Keaton play Alex and Ruth Carver in Ruth & Alex (2014), a wistfully bland property-based dramedy that comes off...
Film Review: ‘The Salt of the Earth’
★★★★☆ “Everyone should see these images to see how terrible out species is,” says Brazilian photography Sebastião Salgado as he reviews the photographs that...
