Anyone who found this winter’s cycle of Oscar-bait movies about the magic of cinema rather too middlebrow may find respite in Quentin Dupieux’s Smoking Causes Coughing, the opening film at this year’s Glasgow FrightFest. Rather than the sanctified work of John Ford or Gene Kelly, Smoking Causes Coughing is inspired […]
Satire
Hounded (2022) A Successful Social Horror Of The Class Divide (VOD Review)
Alexander MacKendrick (The Man with a White Suit & Sweet Smell of Success)
Season Finale Baby! This week, I am joined by Graham (POP SCREEN) and Aidan (LB) to talk about Ealing man turned award-winning educator, Alexander MacKendrick. A man whose teachings have been turned into one of the definitive filmmaking books, “on Filmmaking” it’s called, funnily enough. As for his films, we […]
A Case for a Rookie Hangman: as thoroughly bananas as the title suggests (Review)
A Face in the Crowd: The American nightmare, years ahead of its time (Review)
An American television institution from the days before American sitcoms was the backbone of Channel Four, most Britons will be familiar with The Andy Griffith Show through its cultural after-effects, rather than the show itself. This writer first heard of it via the distorting mirror of ‘Floyd the Barber’, the […]
One, Two, Three (1961): Billy Wilder’s Satirical Greatest Hits
De Niro & De Palma: The Early Films (1968-70)(Review)
Daisies (1966) A High-Punk, High-Art, High-Feminist one of a Kind (Review)
The Crazies (1973) Romero obliterates small-town America in harsh anti-military satire (Review)
Escape from the Liberty Cinema (1990) intoxicatingly rebellious riff on the Purple Rose of Cairo (Review)
Second Run are one of the more remarkable labels operating in the UK, focusing on forgotten and obscure Eastern European films during the past decade. There is one concurrent theme common in many of the titles they pluck from obscurity, their political awareness. The by-product of this is a dual-pronged […]