Viewers for whom the former Czechoslovakia is, in the notorious words of Neville Chamberlain, “a faraway country of which we know little”, might be puzzled by one repeated image in Ján Kádar and Elmar Klos’s 1965 Oscar-winner The Shop on the High Street. It’s a huge pyramid erected by Nazi collaborators, […]
Second Run DVD
Joshua Oppenheimer: Early Work (1995-2003) It’s hard to imagine any limit to his imagination (Review)
For most filmgoers, Joshua Oppenheimer emerged fully-formed out of nowhere with his landmark 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. A horrifyingly intimate portrait of elderly death squad leaders in Indonesia, it fused fearless journalism with surreal, fantastical black comedy – a mix which earned the film the support of Werner […]
Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) the most groundbreaking and innovative director of the 21st century (Review)
The first film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul begins with a shot that approximates the feeling of tuning an analogue radio; mysterious, haunting, archaic and likely to land you somewhere you weren’t expecting. It’s a black-and-white tracking shot through the front window of a moving vehicle, with an overlapping sound mix that […]
Something Different / A Bagful of Fleas (1962-3) breezy, charming and fiercely political (Review)
All My Good Countrymen (1968) Even a dictatorship can’t keep a lid on this (Review)
A rural, bawdy, political epic with magical realist fringes, full of drinking, singing and close-ups on weathered peasant faces, Vojtěch Jasný’s 1968 film All My Good Countrymen is exactly the sort of thing some people think of when you talk about classic European cinema. Following the fortunes and misfortunes of […]
The Wolfpack – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 33
This week we discover some peculiar childhood memories. Our Off the Shelf section has an eccentric bunch with Rob covering the Taiwanese film Exit and pronouncing everything wrong, and Ryan enjoying rage-house icon Bronson. Both movies were book-ended by a Graham two-fer – a collection of shorts by Richard Massingham […]
Dragon’s Return (1968) A Jaw-Dropping Masterpiece of the Slovak Style (Review)
All generalisations are false, up to and including this one. But it does feel as if, even before Czechoslovakia divided into two nations, there were already two parallel cinemas existing in it. You have the Czech films of Jan Švankmajer and Věra Chytilová; witty, urban, fast-cut, colourful, likely to appeal […]
War and Peace (2002) monumental War Documentary more committed to peace than bloodshed (Review)
War When Mark Cousins started his monthly column in Sight & Sound magazine in 2012, a large chunk of his inaugural piece was spent discussing the work of Anand Patwardhan. Patwardhan is one of those documentarians who the international film festival cognoscenti know and love, yet is almost completely unheard-of […]
Story of my Death (2013) A Dracula film for the more adventurous moviegoer (Review)
The Cruise, Camouflage and Shivers (Polish Cinema Vol. III)(Review)
One of the key dilemmas faced by anyone looking to distribute or exhibit foreign-language cinema is this: do you distribute films that offer insights into a different culture, or do you distribute films that are universal? The former, of course, is something that many arthouse habitués would cite as a […]