DVD Review: ‘Big Eyes’
★★☆☆☆ Released today on DVD, Tim Burton’s Big Eyes (2014) stars Amy Adams as Margaret Keane (née Ulbrich), a woman we first encounter on...
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
Film Review: ‘Town That Dreaded Sundown’
★★☆☆☆ The Town That Dreaded Sundown (2014) is a bizarre remake/sequel hybrid of the 1976 film of the same name. That film, directed by...
DVD Review: ‘Maidan’
★★★★☆ Maidan Nezalezhnosti is a square in the centre of Kiev in Ukraine. It gained its name – literally translated as Independence Square –...
Film Review: ‘Lost River’
★★★☆☆ Ryan Gosling makes a return to cinema screens – this time in the director’s chair – with his first feature film Lost River...
Film Review: ‘Bypass’
★★☆☆☆ Better Things director Duane Hopkins’ second feature, Bypass (2014), is a stylistically overblown tale from the lower echelons of crime and economic hardship....
Film Review: ‘The Decent One’
★★★☆☆ Even for a Nazi, Heinrich Luitpold Himmler was a monumentally unattractive person. With his pencil neck, his weak watery eyes, his Touché Turtle...
Blu-ray Review: ‘Rollerball’
★★★★☆ Dystopias are usually set in a tweaked present rather than a distant future. 1984 is simply 1948, the year of its composition, writ...
Blu-ray Review: ‘Network’
★★★★★ “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” So screams deranged anchorman Howard Beale. However, it’s a different...
