John Bleasdale
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Venice 2011: ‘Faust’ review
★★★★☆ Alexander Sokurov’s Faust (2010) – awarded the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival – begins high above the earth, gazing into a mirror that looks like a cinema screen, before we – flapping and twirling in the wind – descend towards a teeming city, a cramped besieged metropolis; part-European citadel, part biblical-Babel.This…
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Venice 2011: ‘Faust’ wins Golden Lion
The gongs have been distributed at this year’s Venice Film Festival and the winner of the coveted Golden Lion is Aleksandr Sokurov‘s Faust, starring Hanna Schygulla, Isolda Dychauk, Georg Friedrich and Maxim Mehmet. The film looks remarkable, with cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel employing all sorts of distortion from fairground mirrors to fuzzy lenses, creating a world which…
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Venice 2011: The Race for the Golden Lion
The Venice Film Festival has never been the type of festival where the awards are particularly important – its gongs have never quite have the same marketability as the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or. Yet competition is fun; meaningless and irritating – but entertaining nonetheless.I was delighted when it was announced that Golden Lion-winner Darren…
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Venice 2011: ‘Killer Joe’ review
★★★★☆ Memories of director William Friedkin’s former glories, specifically The Exorcist (1973) and The French Connection (1971), have made sitting through past tripe like Jade (1995) and Rules of Engagement (2000) palpably depressing. So it is with great pleasure that I can report that Killer Joe (2011), which premiered at this year’s Venice Film Festival…