This week Rob gets traded for an older production version (for purely technical reasons of course). We look at Andrzej Zulawski’s baffling final film “Cosmos”, notorious video nasty “The Burning” and F.W. Murnau’s “The Grand Duke’s Finances”. Our Feature Presentation doubled up and mutated a second Werner Herzog-shaped head in […]
F.W. Murnau
Tartuffe (1925) Dynamic, daring and full of beautiful compositions, it’s definitely more than lesser Murnau (Review)
In Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film The Silence of the Sea, Howard Vernon’s tragically naive Nazi lieutenant tries to curry favour with the French family he’s staying with by praising their culture. He says his Fatherland has but one emblematic literary genius, Goethe, but France is spoiled for choice with Zola, […]
Nosferatu (1922): The most important Horror film ever made (Review)
Each and every Halloween a classic Horror film is lavished with a limited cinema run. Taking high street cinema chain Cineworld for example, over the last two years they have screened Wes Craven’s 1984 classic Nightmare on Elm Street and Joe Dante’s anarchic delight, Gremlins. This year there’s something that […]
Dr Mabuse, The Gambler (1922): Fritz Lang, again, decades and decades ahead of his time (Review)
Cinema in its essence is a visual medium; the silent film can be viewed as nothing but cinema in its purest form. That’s the theory anyhow. Contemporary audiences have written pre-sound cinema as archaic and therefore unworthy of any prolonged attention beyond that which one would pay to a historical […]