New Arrow Video documentary, Clapboard Jungle, is a curious creation. It’s a documentary about filmmaking that covers multiple strands almost simultaneously. It’s a personal diary of director Justin McConnell as he grapples with the existential angst of being an up and coming writer-director who is seeing their peers, whether talented […]
Documentary
Billie Eilish – The World’s a Little Blurry (Pop Screen 11)
Rolling Thunder Revue (2019) One for the Martin Scorsese & Bob Dylan completists (Review)
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves (1968/2005) red-hot takes (Review)
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves is the new Blu-Ray release from Criterion UK. It contains genuine footage of the Roswell incident, cast-iron evidence of voter fraud, and natural health secrets that THEY don’t want you to know. None of the preceding sentence is true, but if I hadn’t come […]
The Times of Harvey Milk (1984): You Can Kill the Man, But You Cannot Kill the Spirit (Review)
Released on Criterion Blu-ray this week is the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, filmmaker Roger Epstein’s 1984 documentary about a true, political trailblazer, Harvey Milk. For many people, and certainly those of us on this side of the pond, Harvey Milk only really came to our attention thanks to […]
Morgiana – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 276
Our last Director’s Lottery* sees us tackle one of Graham’s beloved Czechoslovak New Wave directors – Juraj Herz, the thrilling maniac behind The Cremator. We chose his 1972 Gothic fantasy Morgiana, which is less viciously political than his best-known film but equally mad, and equally replete with fish-eye lenses. In […]
Czechmate – In Search of Jiri Menzel (2018) a love letter to Czech New Wave (Review)
Antonio Gaudí (1984): pure cinema explores pure imagination (review)
Hiroshi Teshigahara, the first Asian filmmaker to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar, is today best remembered for his quartet of collaborations with the novelist Kōbō Abe: Pitfall, The Face of Another, The Ruined Map and Woman in the Dunes, the latter of which got the Academy’s attention. Criterion […]
The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: A visceral indictment of war (Review)
Dawson City: Frozen Time (2016) … Long Lost Figments Of A Beautiful, Experimental Documentary (Review)
I find it hard to review Dawson City: Frozen Time without writing about the background context behind Bill Morrison’s visually euphoric documentary. In 1978, construction workers unearthed a long lost silent film collection from a subarctic swimming pool in a Yukon mining village, not far from the titular Dawson City, […]