There’s never been much consensus about the value of Francois Truffaut’s work after the first five or six years of his career, the most commonly accepted view being that after the his key intervention in the Cannes Festival protests of 1968, Enfant Terrible’s old principles seemed to row back and […]
Billy Stanton
Billy Stanton is a writer and film-maker based in London, and originally from Portsmouth. His short fiction has been widely published online and in print. His latest short film ‘Noli (This City Doesn't Gleam)' is currently on the festival circuit. He also co-runs and co-hosts the Noli Me Tangere Short Film Festival in London, aimed at providing a platform for experimental and underground short cinema.
Haxan (1922) One of the Single Most Important Texts for Folk Horror
Sometimes it can be hard to know where to begin with a review, especially when it’s a title like Haxan – Benjamin Christensen’s 1922 hybrid horror documentary-esque essay that, it could be argued, created this type of film. It walks a strange tightrope between over-familiarity and freshness, shock and nostalgia […]
Crumb (1994) A Meditation on an Important – and Controverisal – American artist (Review)
I have to admit that I’m no Crumb-head, and I came to this documentary – made by friend-of-Robert and ex-collaborator Terry Zwigoff (Ghost World) – knowing the man’s legendary underground comics and other works mainly only in passing. Crumb is now available in the UK in a Criterion Blu-Ray that […]
Merry-Go-Round (1956) The Realism of Love from a Hungarian Classic (Review)
In the booklet accompanying Second Run’s new Blu-Ray release of Zoltán Fábri’s Merry-Go-Round (1956), author and Hungarian cinema specialist John Cunningham highlights a comment made in 1995 by the then French president Francois Mitterand. At the time, a group of filmmakers were working on a commemorative documentary for the centenary […]
All That Money Can Buy (aka The Devil and Daniel Webster)(1941) Reclaiming of a Lost Expressionist Classic (Review)
A full decade after the death of F. W. Murnau, and almost thirteen years after his American film debut with Sunrise (a.k.a. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans), it took a “student” of both him and Max Reinhardt to revive German expressionism in Hollywood. Once again we find not just […]
The Comedy Man (1964) The Kitchen Sink of an England Long Gone (Review)
There’s a famous idiom that, in simple terms, states that comedy is simply tragedy plus time, but is the reverse also true? Recently released on Blu-ray by Studio Canal, Alvin Rakoff’s The Comedy Man (1964), is a satirical take on the kitchen sink dramas that were popular during that period, […]
In The Rearview (Kinoteka 2024)(Review)
When Maciek Hamela was shooting this documentary on the roads between Ukraine and Poland there was probably still hope that this would remain a relatively short-lived war. Indeed, several of Hamela’s passengers – refugees carried in his volunteer’s van from urban and rural areas across the nation – often speak […]
Horror Story – (Kinoteka 2024)(Review)
As the feature debut of writer-director Adrian Apanel, Horror Story pulls off a nice little magic trick. When fresh-faced finance graduate Tomek (Jakub Zajac), rents a room in a crumbling boarding house that’s straight out of the horror cinema interior decorating textbook, we expect things to go full-blown supernatural (or […]
Doppelganger. The Double (2023) (Kinoteka 2024)
Here’s useful viewing for anyone wondering what the attitude of the Polish public towards the USSR might be almost forty five years on from the forming of Solidarity. Doppelganger. The Double is a new thriller from film-maker Jan Holoubek that’s set between the late-seventies and mid-eighties, and is currently showing […]
Lone Star (1996) Lightning Paced Tour of John Sayles’s America (Review)
John Sayles, the Don of American independent cinema, has dedicated much of his career to examining and exploring buried and ‘unofficial’ histories. This fascination, this need to tell, has taken Sayles far, from the coal-mining hollers of West Virginia (Matewan) to the tundras of Alaska (Limbo) to Latin/Central America (Men with Guns) and out […]