Given that he directed some of the finest American films of all time, it’s easy to overlook Alfred Hitchcock’s status as a British filmmaker. Famously characterized as the Master of Suspense, Hitchcock’s work defined much of the 1940s and 50s, back home though most of his work came in the […]
Arrow Academy
Cosmos (2015) Żuławski ransacks his knowledge of art and pop culture for the most surreal swansong (Review)
It’s a strange world, but has it ever looked stranger than it does through the eyes of Witold Gombrowicz and Andrzej Żuławski? Żuławski was the late Polish director whose film Possession became quite the artiest thing on the Department of Public Prosecutions’ infamous ‘video nasties’ list. Gombrowicz was one of a generation of European authors who […]
The Glass Key (1942) & The Veronica Lake Show (Review)
In his 1970 essay Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir, Raymond Durgnat suggests that the genre’s most common topics developed as a method of plausible deniability. As the Red Scare hotted up, left-leaning directors could address corruption in, say, prisons or boxing and have it stand as a microcosm […]
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 […]
Fox and his Friends & Chinese Roulette (1975) The many faces of Fassbinder (Review)
The Taviani Brothers Collection (1977-1984) Reality and Fiction Working Together (Review)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) Still a powerful, morality Western 75 years later (Review)
The Firemen’s Ball (1967) A good fun satire on totalitarianism? (Review)
3 Women (1977) Stealthing its way into Altman’s canon of classics (Review)
We all know how Robert Altman spent the 1970s, right? M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs Miller. Freewheeling satirical ensemble pieces, playing fast and loose with genre, inventing the adjective Altmanesque for their naturalistic sprawl. Except there’s another face of Altman’s ’70s work. He was so prolific that […]
The Beast (1975) Boro’s eye-wateringly animalistic Beauty & the Beast (Review)
Before we turn our attention to the last disc of Arrow’s Blu-Ray Borowczyk restorations, let us take stock of the man’s career up to this point. A shoestring genius of experimental animation, “Boro” had proved his versatility with four massively different features; the crackpot animated comedy of Theatre of Mr. […]