Black Girl and Borom Sarret, the two films by Ousmane Sembène included on this new BFI release, are historic films. That’s not a value judgement, that’s a statement of fact. A documentary-style account of a day in the life of a troubled wagon driver, Borom Sarret was the first short […]
BFi
The Wolfpack – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 33
This week we discover some peculiar childhood memories. Our Off the Shelf section has an eccentric bunch with Rob covering the Taiwanese film Exit and pronouncing everything wrong, and Ryan enjoying rage-house icon Bronson. Both movies were book-ended by a Graham two-fer – a collection of shorts by Richard Massingham […]
How to be Eccentric: The Essential Richard Massingham
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Newly Minted as the Greatest Documentary Ever Made (Review)
Blackhat – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 8
Back to 1942 (2012) Come and See China in this gruelling war drama (Review)
The BFI has had many seasons dedicated to many national cinemas, directors, epochs or movements, with their status they have also brought many old science fiction programmes, documentaries or, as is currently the case, Chinese films into a focus they couldn’t enjoy otherwise. Today they have released two home video […]
Ex Machina & Shin’ya Tsukamoto – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 4
Little Lost Robot (Out of this World)
Before production started on Doctor Who in 1963, the BBC commissioned an internal document assessing the difficulties of producing a science-fiction series. In particular, they were concerned that female viewers would be uninterested in such a show. Perhaps one reason why the show’s creator Sydney Newman pressed on was that […]
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961): perfectly pitched 1960s British apocalypse movie (Review)
Given the recent unseasonably warm spell and the continuing discourse on global Warming, Val Guest’s 1961 sci-fi drama The Day the Earth caught fire takes on an eerily prescient quality. First Guest and Wolf Mankowitz’s London suffers an unseasonably warm spell, then cripplingly thick heat fog which segued its way […]
A Farewell to Arms (1932) World War I movie or classical melodrama romance? (Review)
The Dukes Theatre in Lancaster recently had a run from progressive multimedia Theatre Company imitating the dog that adapted Ernest Hemingway’s anti-war novel A Farewell to Arms. During the same window, BFI issued a Blu-ray/DVD release of Frank Borzage’s 1932 Oscar-winning film (Best Cinematography and Sound) adaptation of the classic […]