While he doesn’t have the same cut-through of his halycon days with Tetsuo, Bullet Ballet or A Snake of June, Shinya Tsukamoto is undoubtedly one of the more consistent filmmakers in Japan. This is partly due to that movie industry not being as buoyant as it once was, but also because he’s a director […]
Anti-War
In The Rearview (Kinoteka 2024)(Review)
When Maciek Hamela was shooting this documentary on the roads between Ukraine and Poland there was probably still hope that this would remain a relatively short-lived war. Indeed, several of Hamela’s passengers – refugees carried in his volunteer’s van from urban and rural areas across the nation – often speak […]
Paths of Glory (1957) Kubrick’s Antiwar Masterpiece in 4K (Review)
Coach to Vienna (1966) Defying the Perceived Wisdoms of WWII (Review)
Red Angel (1966) Bloody And Fearless Japanese Anti-War Satire (Review)
Two New Criterions: Devi (1960) and The Thin Red Line (1998)(Review)
After early November’s Blu-Ray of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox, Criterion UK release a pair of movies unconnected save for their very different approaches to making a film about faith. And that’s “a film about faith” rather than a “faith-based film”. The latter is generally used as a synonym for […]
The Ascent (1977) The Greatest Anti-War Film You Haven’t Seen (Review)
Released on Blu-ray this week via the Criterion label comes arguably the best war, or rather anti-war film, you’ve never seen. What’s that at the back? You’ve seen Melville’s Army of Shadows already? Well that’s OK, because I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about Larisa Shepitko’s stunning 1977 Golden […]
How I Won the War: much more than just Beatles trivia (Review)
The Crazies (1973) Romero obliterates small-town America in harsh anti-military satire (Review)
The Human Condition (1959) a must-see for any fan of world cinema (Review)
WWII is a frequently used setting throughout the course of cinema history. No matter what, every critically acclaimed filmmaker must have at least one film set in-between the time period of 1939 – 1945. Steven Spielberg presented the horrors of the Holocaust in unflinching black-and-white realism in Schlinder’s List. Wolfgang […]