Film Review: ‘Point and Shoot’
★★☆☆☆ Point and Shoot (2014) is a bizarrely fascinating documentary, recording the adventures of Matt VanDyke, a young American from Baltimore who ended up...
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: ‘Foxcatcher’
★★★★★ When Barton Fink was asked to write a wrestling picture, it struck him as the most demeaning use of his talents. He wished...
Film Review: The Homesman
★★★★☆ Tommy Lee Jones’ second directorial effort following the underrated The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (which played at Cannes in 2005), The Homesman...
Korean Film Festival: ‘Pieta’ review
★★★★☆ Set in the Cheonggyecheon district of Seoul City, acclaimed South Korean director Kim Ki-duk’s 18th film, Pieta (2012), tells the story of Kang-do...
DVD Review: ‘The Golden Dream’
★★★☆☆ Diego Quemada-Díez’s debut film The Golden Dream (2013) so impressed at Cannes in 2013 that it received a special award and fulsome praise...
Film Review: ‘Birdman’
★★★★★ Last year, Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013) wowed audiences with its bravura setpieces and technical prowess, taking us into space and back down to...
Film Review: ‘Filmed in Supermarionation’
★★★☆☆ ‘The Swinging Sixties. Great Britain. Slough’. Perhaps not the most enticing sequence of title cards, but one that gives a perfect indication of...
DVD Review: ‘The Great British Train Robbery’
★★☆☆☆ Early on a Thursday morning in the depths of the Buckinghamshire countryside, the Travelling Post Office train en route to London Euston stopped...
