John Bleasdale

★★★☆☆ Following on from 2011’s raucous American middle-class comedy Carnage – and as we await his long-gestating Dreyfus affair project – Polish director Roman Polanski returns to UK cinema screens with Venus in Fur (2013), a two-handed adaptation of the play by David Ives. The Ives production itself tells the story of an attempt to…

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★★★★☆ Director Jim Jarmusch has managed an almost impossible feat with new film Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), in competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival – he’s made vampires interesting again. British actors Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton play Adam and Eve, a pair of night-dwelling bloodsuckers. Eve is based in Tangiers where she…

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★★★★☆ Władziu Valentino Liberace was a phenomenal success, his recording and performing career spanning four decades. A flamboyant showman and housewives’ favourite, Liberace fought long and hard to keep his homosexuality a secret until his death in 1987. Thus, Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra (2013) arrives at in UK cinemas with a lot of baggage.…

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★★★★☆ Award-winning Japanese director Hirokazu Kore-eda lights up this year’s London Film Festival with Like Father, Like Son (2013), a closely-observed family drama which delves into contemporary Japanese life and, in the process, becomes an examination of social values and class. Ryota (Masaharu Fukuyama) is a born winner – a successful, work-obsessed architect living in…

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★★★★★ Last year, it was a tale of time-tested amour which ultimately went on to pick up the Palme d’Or. This year, Abdellatif Kechiche’s Blue Is the Warmest Colour (2013) – a tale of young love and the intensity/agony it entails – was the word-of-mouth hit that walked away with Cannes’ top prize. Based on…

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★★☆☆☆ Showing in the Un Certain Regard section of the 66th Cannes Film Festival, Katrin Gebbe’s debut film Nothing Bad Can Happen (Tore tanzt, 2013) is a harrowing tale of abuse with a highly dubious morality at its core. Tore (Julius Feldmeier) is a young, gawky member of The Jesus Freaks, a collective dressed like…

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★★★☆☆ James Gray has always enjoyed a good reputation in France and so it comes as little surprise to see his fifth film, The Immigrant (2013), showing in competition here at Cannes. The year is 1920 and in the wake of the Great War, Polish immigrant Ewa Cybulski (Marion Cotillard) arrives at Ellis Island –…

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★★★★☆ The Cannes Film Festival just got medieval on our asses with Arnaud des Pallières’ Palme d’Or outsider Michael Kohlhaas (2013), a tale of injustice and revolt set in 16th century France. Adapted from the Heinrich von Kleist novella, Pallières’ latest follows the plight of its eponymous hero (Mads Mikkelsen), a happy and prosperous family…

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★★★★★ The Coen brothers return to the London Film Festival this year with the barnstorming Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), a picaresque odyssey following the close-calls and mishaps of an also-ran folk songster within the New York Greenwich Village scene. It’s the early sixties, well before Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary, and…

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★★★★☆ “We bring light to people’s homes” says Gilles (Olivier Gourmet), a middle-aged foreman in Rebecca Zlotowski’s Grand Central (2013). The protagonists of her latest film are young, unskilled French workers who, at the end of their tether, gladly jump at the chance to work in the dangerously radioactive areas of France’s fifty-nine nuclear power…

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