John Bleasdale

★★☆☆☆ Camino Skies tracks six pilgrims from New Zealand and Australia as they embark on the historic five hundred mile pilgrimage that winds across Spain to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The gruelling pilgrimage – known in English as the Way of St. James – across the top of Spain has been…

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★★☆☆☆ Ours is the age of the poisonous neologism. Never have so many words been spawned to express disdain and hatred, like a speckled fungus crawling up a shower curtain: ‘incel’, ‘snowflake’, ‘libtard’, ‘feminazi’, and our very own ‘Brexit’. ‘Cuck’ has two uses: one in politics, where it denigrates liberals, and the other in pornography,…

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★★★★☆ It’s easy to think that our lives have become bottle episodes in recent weeks: single location stories cut off from the grand narrative of our ordinary lives and the usual onrush of world events, culture and sport included. Current uncertainty makes this hiatus feel like it’s stretching out to a vanishing point on an…

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★★★☆☆ Fabienne (Catherine Deneuve) is an ageing star of French cinema. Her self-aggrandising memoirs have just been published and her screenwriter daughter Lumir (Juliette Binoche), along with her husband Hank (Ethan Hawke), return to Paris with their daughter to celebrate the occasion. One immediate consequence is the resignation of Fabienne’s factotum, whose implacable calm has…

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★★★★☆ Timothy Greenfield-Sanders’ timely documentary on the Nobel Prize-winning novelist is a persuasive argument for rereading Morrison if you’ve already read her works – and if you haven’t, an imperative to get to it. If we’re not to be consumed by total despair in the era of Trump, it is absolutely vital that we recall…

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★★★★☆ An acutely observed and frequently heartbreaking documentary, Luke Lorentzen’s Midnight Family chronicles one family’s privately run ambulance, saving lives and attempting to break-even during wee hours in Mexico City. What do you do when the ambulance chasers are other ambulances? This is the question posited by Midnight Family. Nine million people live in Mexico…

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★★☆☆☆ Actors playing other actors always feels like a dangerous act of appropriation. Geoffrey Rush in The Life and Death of Peter Sellers, James Franco in James Dean and Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn, all feel like a claim is being made: “I can play them inside and out, so I must also…

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★★★★★ Joaquin Phoenix gives an Oscar-worthy performance as the Clown Prince of Crime in Todd Phillips’ unique take on the Batman supervillain Joker, which also won the Golden Lion at this year’s Venice Film Festival. Joker is a film that didn’t feel necessary when announced. There has been a glut of superhero movies and there…

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