Haunted by the disappearance of his sister due to an urban legend, Ryan infiltrates a group of vloggers who specialise in completing online challenges in haunted spaces, hoping to persuade them to play the Elevator Game. The latest film from director Rebekah McKendry (Glorious), who is also the host of […]
review
The Fox in the Forest (2022: Tabletop Matters) Cards, cunning, and fairy tales (Review)
How’s the endless pandemic treating you? How was Lockdown and its sequels? How’re you finding sticking stuff up your nose, swabbing your throat, steamed up glasses, or washing your hands until they’re sore? If you’re looking for a diversion from the daily doom, try drifting into fiction, fantasy, or the […]
The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith: “A Fugitive from Justice…Or from Injustice”?
Often cited as one of the most important Australian films ever made and a key text in the Aussie New Wave movement of the 1970s, Fred Schepisi’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith is a beautifully shot yet heart wrenching and savage account of institutionalised racism in colonial Australia at the turn […]
Mark Isaacs: Five Films, One Filmmaker (2001-2017)(Review)
Second Run dropped a bombshell of a box set dedicated to the films of Marc Isaacs, a British documentary filmmaker known for creating closed-off, intimate films with a cast of many memorable and sometimes eccentric personalities. It doesn’t matter if his contributors are small-time BNP supporters, nobody street sweepers, or […]
Manina, the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter (1949) Host to the Best Extra Feature of 2017? (Review)
Let’s get the big issue out of the way first: Eureka’s new Blu-ray release of Manina, the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter by Willy Rozier boasts the most unexpected and delightful extra feature of the year. It actually pertains not to the title feature, but to another Rozier film included as a bonus, […]
Every Picture Tells a Story: The Art Films of James Scott (1967-84) (Review)
Doberman Cop (1977) A peculiar Sonny Chiba character in an endlessly odd police thriller (Review)
Once upon a time, it was instantly apparent when a film was based on a comic or graphic novel as those films concerned themselves with the super-powered and the otherworldly, then around the mid-1990s there was a paradigm shift and the nature of these titles became indistinguishable from the more […]
Daughters of the Dust (1991) recalls Tarkovsky, Resnais or any other sanctified European arthouse auteur you might care to name (Review)
Julie Dash’s debut film turned 25 last year, but even without the anniversary, this sumptuous BFI restoration would still probably exist. In the late 2010s, the film has become more relevant than ever. It is an inspiration for a new generation of African-American directors – Ava DuVernay has repeatedly cited […]
Stockholm, My Love (2016) The audacity that marks out the best documentary-fiction hybrids is missing (Review)
Taskafa, Stories of the Street/Estate, a Reverie: Two Films by Andrea Luka Zimmerman
This DVD from Second Run features two wonderfully satisfying and symbiotic documentary features from filmmaker and creative artist Andrea Luka Zimmerman, Taskafa, Stories of the Street from 2013, and Estate, a Reverie from 2015. On initial inspection you may think there is very little thematically in common between Taskafa, an […]