There’s an anecdote about Heat and Dust from producer Ismail Merchant in Robert Emmet Long’s 1993 book The Films of Merchant Ivory that I’ve always liked because I think it says a lot about not only the cultural differences between the British film industry and Hollywood but also the different […]
Reviews
One, Two, Three (1961): Billy Wilder’s Satirical Greatest Hits
The Song of Bernadette: a film of faith, but not blind faith (Review)
There’s a common lament among certain American Christian bloggers that Hollywood doesn’t make movies with spiritual content like it used to, which to this writer’s eyes does a disservice to interesting modern films about Christianity – The Tree of Life, Silence, First Reformed et al – and also glosses over […]
Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz (Review)
The number of bums on cinema seats may be falling and streaming platform’s as numerous as they are unstoppable, with home video falling somewhere between the two. Even so, there will always be a place for DVD and Blu-ray collectors thanks to labels giving boutique releases to the weird, wonderful […]
Stanley, a Man of Variety (2016): Timothy Spall’s surreal comic trip, for better and worse (Review)
Ikarie XB-1 (1963): The best Space & Soap Opera you’ve never seen (Review)
Widows (2018): A tense & intelligent repacking of a 1980s TV classic (Review)
Death in Venice (1971): Luchino Visconti makes a good film, but a bad adaptation (Review)
Sister Street Fighter (1974): Stealth Feminist Exploitation Icon? (Review)
Ugetsu (1953) Mizoguchi, Japan’s most elusive master director (Review)
For all that Kenji Mizoguchi tends to be introduced as one of Japan’s post-war triumvirate of great filmmakers, along with his younger contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, the evidence for such claims has been poorly distributed. This is partly due to the majority of the prolific director’s films being […]