Venice 2014: Sivas review
★★★☆☆ Turkish filmmaker Kaan Mujdeci’s debut feature film and Venice competition entry Sivas (2014) is a well-shot if slight story of a young boy...
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
Venice 2014: ‘Red Amnesia’ review
★★★☆☆ In a Venice that has been bizarrely bereft of strong female performances and roles – Bechdel tests at the ready – Xiaoshuai Wang’s...
Venice 2014: ‘Pasolini’ review
★★★☆☆ Novelist, scenarist, journalist, political thinker, opinion maker and film director, Pier Paolo Pasolini was and is a huge influence on Italian intellectual life...
Venice 2014: ‘The Last Hammer Blow’ review
★★★★☆ “It’s called tragic but don’t let’s snivel,” says a character in director Alix Delaporte’s new film The Last Hammer Blow (2014), a refreshing...
Venice 2014: ‘Senza Nessuna Pietà’ review
★★☆☆☆ Screening in the Orizzonti sidebar of the Venice Film Festival, Michele Alhaique’s gangland romance Senza Nessuna Pietà (2014) is a slickly made yet...
Venice 2014: ‘Fires on the Plain’ review
★★★★☆ A tubercular nightmare vision of war in all its bloody ferocity, Tetsuo (1989) director Shin’ya Tsukamoto’s Fires on the Plain (2014) stormed into...
DVD Review: ‘Mr. Morgan’s Last Love’
★★★☆☆ In Sandra Nettelbeck’s wistful romance Mr. Morgan’s Last Love (2013) Michael Caine plays Matthew Morgan, a retired American professor living in Paris several...
Venice 2014: ‘These Are the Rules’ review
★★★★☆ Ognjen Svilicic’s These Are the Rules (2014) is a modest work of quiet desperation, but it’s obvious restraint and slow unwinding has a...
