John Bleasdale

★★★☆☆ Robert Redford directs and stars in The Company You Keep (2012), which premiered this week at the Venice Film Festival. Redford plays Jim Grant, a small town lawyer bringing up his daughter following the death of his wife in a car accident. His life is turned on its head, however, when crusading reporter Ben…

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★★★☆☆ Alexei Balabanov’s latest film, Me Too (Ja Tozhe Khochu, 2012), begins almost like a gangster film. We watch on as the Bandit (Aleksander Mosin) sees off four adversaries in a back-alley shoot out, but the piece soon veers away at a 90 degree angle from genre filmmaking territory and goes to a place much…

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★★★★★ Deep in Belgium’s Ardennes forest, life goes on in a small rustic village as it has done for many years. Seasons come and go, farmers work the land and milk the cows, children play in the woods imitating bird song and festivals are celebrated. The village, dominated by the steepled church, seems immune from…

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★★★☆☆  Henry Alex Rubin follows up the Oscar-nominated Murderball (2005) with Disconnect (2012), a multi-strand narrative film dealing with the impact of social media on a diverse cast of interrelated characters. Two high school students fool a lonely classmate into believing that he has a female admirer; a grieving couple, (Alexander Skarsgård and Paula Patton)…

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★★☆☆☆ In competition for the Golden Lion at the 69th Venice Film Festival, Valeria Sarmiento’s 150 minute-long Portuguese historical drama Lines of Wellington (Linhas de Wellington, 2012) is a large plodding europudding of a movie. The film opens with the battle between the British and Portuguese forces against the French at the battle of Bussaco.…

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★★☆☆☆ Returning to feature length filmmaking after his brilliantly dynamic 2010 mini-series Carlos, Olivier Assayas’ Something in the Air (Après mai, 2012) deals with the coming-of-age story of young French student Gilles (Clement Metayer), who is torn between his political convictions and personal ambitions in the wake of the political turmoil of the Spring of…

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★★★☆☆ ‘Beat’ Takeshi Kitano returns to the Venice Lido this year with Outrage Beyond (Autoreiji: Biyondo, 2012), a sequel to his 2010 gangster drama Outrage. Writing, directing and editing, Kitano also stars as Otomo, a jailed Yakuza whose imminent release is making the Sanno family jittery. Both a nightclub hostess and a cop mixed up…

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★★☆☆☆ Acclaimed director Terrence Malick’s latest film, To the Wonder, screened at the 69th Venice Film Festival and was subsequently greeted with a mixed chorus of both boos and applause.

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★★★☆☆ Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy began with Paradise: Love (2012), first screened just a few months ago in Cannes. Each film takes as its protagonist one of three sisters, who seem to be at a point of crisis in their lives. For Love, the first sister was on a trip to Africa to find, if…

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★★★☆☆ “I woke up one morning and found myself famous,” wrote Lord Byron, one of the first celebrities in our modern sense of the word. Today, the notion of celebrity as a nightmare rather than a dream is already ingrained in our culture. Woody Allen’s To Rome with Love (2012) features a nobody suddenly thrust…

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