In Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, two of the main characters are briefly caught in the middle of Mexico City during a massacre. The event is not named, the perpetrators barely identified except for one specific, named (fictional) character, who we have seen in a few earlier scenes. It is brief and […]
History
Silence and Cry (1968) a thought-provoking portrait of a unique director at a critical juncture in history (Review)
Sword of Doom (1966) one of the highest watermarks in Samurai cinema (Review)
The Mystery of Picasso (1956) A meeting of Auteurs, Picasso & Clouzot (Review)
J’Accuse (1938) World War I Historical Epic with Silent Film and Grindhouse Brio (Review)
In literature, the phrase J’accuse is most associated with Émile Zola, who used it for the title of an essay accusing the French government of corruption and anti-Semitism in the case of Alfred Dreyfus. (Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was charged with treason in a clumsy attempt to cover up […]
Ip Man: The Final Fight (2013) Too many plots spoil this non-action kung fu broth (Review)
Charlie Chaplin: The Essanay Comedies (1915-1916) (Review)
Commenting on the ease of writing a review never needs to be brought up because it isn’t relevant. However, any notion of hardship from writing such an article typically comes from a need to evade spoilers. BFI’s Chaplin Essanay’s comedy set is different purely because of how uniform and similar […]
Hiroshi Inagaki – The Samurai Trilogy (1955-56) Not Quite Samurai Classics (Review)
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 […]
The Last of the Unjust (2013): Shoah director still throws up genuine moral challenges (Review)
Claude Lanzmann’s complex, heavyweight and incredibly powerful new film The Last of the Unjust is a feature-length reworking of material gathered over the arduous twelve-year shoot for his defining work Shoah. It is an interview with Benjamin Murmelstein, a Viennese rabbi appointed by the Nazis as “Elder” of Theresienstadt, the […]