She’s got armfuls of good reviews and her films have opened at Cannes, but it still feels like people don’t recognise how good Clio Barnard is. Among her peers, Andrea Arnold is the heir apparent of social realist cinema, Ben Wheatley has the genre fans in his corner and Peter […]
Graham Williamson
Jubilee (1978) Pure Punk and Pure Derek Jarman (Review)
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) The Antidote to Biopic Fatigue (Review)
An extraordinary film even by the standards of Criterion’s UK catalogue, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is your go-to film to counter accusations that biopics are inherently stuffy, stylistically conservative Oscar-bait. And it’s all thanks to Hank Williams. After surviving the excesses of the ’70s New Hollywood, […]
Allure (2017) A modern equivalent to ’90s psychological thrillers like Single White Female (Review)
Metropolitan (1990) Whit Stillman’s Comedy of High Society Manners (Review)
Early Hou Hsiao-hsien: Three Films 1980-1983 (Review)
“Success is elusive. Something lost is difficult to find. Progress takes time.” That quote comes from the last film on Eureka Masters of Cinema’s new Blu-Ray collection of early Hou Hsaio-Hsien films, 1983’s The Boys From Fengkuei. After watching all three films in the set, it’s hard not to interpret […]
La Chinoise (1967) More fun than the dry, doctrinaire Godard it is accused of being (Review)
There’s no greater feeling of kinship than learning someone shares your hot take, so let’s start this review of Arrow Academy’s Blu-Ray of La Chinoise by praising one of the extras – a great, informative, witty discussion of the film by Denitza Bantcheva. Listening to Bantcheva, I finally felt like […]
Twin Peaks The Return Episode 18 (The Rewatch)
Twin Peaks the Return Episode 18 MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS WHAT IS YOUR NAME? LA-based viewers of the Twin Peaks finale felt unsettled when Dale Cooper drove up to Eat At Judy’s. This isn’t an unusual feeling when watching Twin Peaks: rewatching this episode, I felt deeply uncomfortable waiting for the […]