John Bleasdale
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Film Review: Frankie
★★☆☆☆ A family assemble for a vacation in Portugal and to confront a looming loss in Ira Sachs’ gentle talkathon, Frankie. The film takes place in the Portuguese city of Sinta, a beautiful location, and a family of disparate elements have gathered here to swim, eat and walk, but mainly to chat – and chat some…
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Film Review: The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet
★★★★★ It seems ridiculous to call a film that is only 73-minutes long an epic, but that is what The Dog Who Wouldn’t Be Quiet feels like. Though it should be made clear, by epic there’s nothing grandiose; there is nary a special effect to be seen and hardly a cast of thousands. But at…
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Film Review: Army of the Dead
★★★☆☆ Is there currently a more divisive director than Zack Snyder? On one side there are the legions of fans and hashtag warriors for who he is a messianic figure of unsurpassed vision. Facing them, the hordes who find his overwrought, bombastic fantasies puerile and utterly vacuous, slowed down to interminable lengths by almost constant…
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IFFR 2021: Madalena review
★★★☆☆ In a small rural town in the middle of acres and acres of soy fields, bodies keep turning up. The latest is the body of a trans woman Madalena (Chloe Milan). The lives of three people seem obscurely affected by the event and are told as separate vignettes. Luziane (Natália Mazarim), who works as…
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IFFR 2021: Liborio review
★★★★☆ It’s the beginning of the 20th century, and Olivorio Mateo (Vicente Santos) is a peasant who disappears in the midst of a storm. In the darkness of a cave, he almost gives up hope but manages to escape in a way that appears to be magical. Upon returning to his village, he calls himself…
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IFFR 2021: Gritt review
★★★★☆ Itonje Søimer Guttormsen’s Gritt is a funny, maddening and at times touching work about art, ambition and how to live. The titular Gritt (Birgitte Larsen) is a familiar figure, both in real life and in culture: the artistic meanderer who desperately wants to express herself but is somehow unable to work out quite what…
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IFFR 2021: Black Medusa review
★★★☆☆ Nada (played with resolute sternness by Nour Hajri) is a young woman who leads a double life. By day she works for an online company; at night she scours the bars and clubs of Tunis for men who want to take her home. There are plenty. Once she has someone hooked, she drugs them…
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Film Review: The Capote Tapes
★★★☆☆ Cinema has a love/hate relationship with Truman Capote. On the evidence of The Capote Tapes, almost everyone did. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – a slim novella a cigarette holder away from plagiarising Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin – was made into an iconic film with a luminous Audrey Hepburn. The filmmakers schmaltzed Tiffany’s up, to…
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Film Review: 76 Days
★★★★☆ The coronavirus and its consequences have already become the subject of cinema. Aside from last year’s lockdown movies like Host and Songbird, Alex Gibney released his j’accuse against the Trump administration’s response in the form of Totally Under Control. In contrast, 76 Days focuses on the beginning of the outbreak in the Chinese city…
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Film Review: About Endlessness
★★★★☆ Only Roy Andersson would call a 78-minute film About Endlessness. It is of a piece with his droll Swedish wit, a universe drawn with fastidious precision and painted in a palette of greys, drab greens, beiges and browns. Made up of a series of related but not necessarily connected vignettes, each filmed with a…