John Bleasdale
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DVD Review: ‘Snowtown’
★★★★★ What the hell happened to sunny Australia? Starting with Greg Mclean’s chillingly bleak Wolf Creek (2005), continuing with David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom (2010) and seen most recently in Justin Kurzel’s Snowtown (2011), Australian cinema now seems fixated with grim portrayals of life down under. Kurzel’s debut, now available to own on DVD and Blu-ray, is…
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DVD Review: Moneyball’
★★★☆☆ How do you win a game when the odds are stacked against you? You change the rules. In Bennett Miller’s Oscar nominee Moneyball (2011), Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) is the team manager of the Oakland Rangers, a team that despite his best efforts always end up losing out to teams with vast economic resources,…
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Film Review: ‘Trishna’
★★★☆☆ Arguably Britain’s most prolific director, Michael Winterbottom returns to Thomas Hardy territory with Trishna (2011), a retooled version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Relocated to present day India and shot in the beautiful rural area of Rajasthan as well as the more familiar Mumbai, Freida Pinto stars as the titular heroine, who lives with…
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DVD Review: ‘The Conformist’
★★★★★ Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) is one of the fiercest denunciations of the moral paralysis and intellectual cowardice that marked the fascist era in Italy. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Marcello Clerici, an upper class Italian who has agreed to collaborate in a plot to assassinate a former professor who has fled fascism to live in…
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Film Review: ‘Martha Marcy May Marlene’
★★★★★ On the face of it, a relatively simple tale, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011) turns out to be one of the most accomplished debuts of recent years. Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) is a damaged young woman who is reunited with her sister after having disappeared for two years. Their relationship has, it seems,…
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DVD Review: ‘Against the Current’
★☆☆☆☆ In Peter Callahan’s 2009 film Against the Current, Joseph Fiennes plays Paul Thompson, a depressed New Yorker with a tragedy in his recent past, who decides to swim down the Hudson from upstate to the sea. He enlists two friends Liz (Elizabeth Reaser) and Jeff (Justin Kirk), to accompany and support him on his…
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Special Feature: Ken Russell 1927-2011
With his shock of white hair and chat show friendly exuberance, the late cult director Ken Russell was a recognisable and entertaining presence throughout the seventies and eighties. He belonged to an extraordinary generation of British filmmakers, which included John Boorman, Nicolas Roeg and Ken Loach. Although diverse, if not idiosyncratic, individuals, they all shared…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Maniac Cop’
★★★☆☆ Some titles say it all, and Maniac Cop (1988) – starring cult movie icon Bruce Campbell – would fall into that category. There’s a maniac cop on the streets of New York, killing people, dressed as a cop…and he’s a maniac. Detective McCrae (Tom Atkins) believes the culprit – as well as being a…
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LFF 2011: ‘Wuthering Heights’
★★★☆☆ Wuthering Heights (2011), Andrea Arnold’s re-telling of Emily Brontë’s classic, is clever and full of passion and intensity; very little of which, unfortunately, is communicated to the viewer. Filmed in a social realist style, the film’s handheld aesthetic blends with close up footage of British flora and fauna as Arnold presents the doomed love…
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DVD Review: ‘One from the Heart’
★★★☆☆ In Francis Ford Coppola’s One from the Heart (1982), Hank (Frederic Forrest) and Frannie (Teri Garr) are two working stiffs living in Las Vegas, locked in a relationship from which much of the fun and affection has drained away. After the umpteenth row, Frannie walks out and into the Fourth of July celebrations. Here…