‘It’s the same old song/ but with a different meaning since you been gone’— Blood Simple is back in cinemas ahead of a blu-ray release by Studiocanal, and there’s no review more pithy than the Four Tops song given pride of place on the film’s soundtrack. I wasn’t even alive […]
Reviews
The Howling (1981) The great werewolf transformation movie (Review)
The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (2017) A Must-See for those feeling Adventurous (Review)
Vampir Cuadecuc (1971) A Surprisingly Sensual and Beautiful avant-garde Vampire Movie (Review)
Sometime in the early 2000s, a Peruvian government spokesman was forced to testily deny online rumours that some of the country’s cabinet were vampires. “A government cannot go around sucking the blood of its people”, the spokesman claimed, inviting the obvious rejoinder; which government has ever refrained from this? The […]
Certain Women (2016) a grown-up, unironic, realist film about ordinary people going through ordinary challenges (Review)
It’s always an interesting statement of values when a prestige home video label decides to release a recent film. Everyone agrees on Kurosawa, Lang and Welles, but which modern director would you put in their company? In America, the Criterion Collection has got behind Wes Anderson so consistently that it’s […]
Kills on Wheels (2016) Two brilliant, searingly honest films flimsily stuck together (Review)
Representation is the big issue – who is having their stories told and which actors are being deprived of acting opportunities. Unfortunately, race and gender are as far as this dialogue has been extended. People who have lifelong disabilities either by accident or birth are seeing opportunities hoovered up by […]
Song to Song
Dunkirk (1958) A poignant and near peerless World War II Movie (Review)
As a child obsessed with war, I well remember watching Dunkirk, Leslie (father of Barry) Norman’s 1958 film that depicted the events of May-June 1940, when the besieged soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were stranded on the coast of France, and the combined efforts of the Royal Navy and […]
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) So overambitious it’s amazing it doesn’t fall apart (Review)
Where, But In America? asked an early working title for Stanley Kramer’s extravagant Ultra Panavision progenitor of the ‘epic comedy’ genre. Scotland is the sensible answer, the planned location of a wacky race that the transatlantic writing duo of William and Tania Rose, famous for Ealing comedies such as The […]