“VENICE IN PERIL” read the signs nestled in the background of quite a few of Nicolas Roeg and Anthony B. Richmond’s stunning deep-focus images throughout Don’t Look Now. They’re the calling cards of a very real, and still active, British charity bent on restoring and conserving the city’s art and […]
George Hardy
John Woo: Last Hurrah for Chivalry & Hand of Death (Review)
Near the end of Hand of Death, a band of brothers come together and hatch a plan to finally defeat their adversary, a traitor to our hero’s Shaolin brotherhood. Playing the least substantial parts in this four-person crew are a young Jackie Chan and John Woo, self-inserted as a scholar […]
Ugetsu (1953) Mizoguchi, Japan’s most elusive master director (Review)
For all that Kenji Mizoguchi tends to be introduced as one of Japan’s post-war triumvirate of great filmmakers, along with his younger contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, the evidence for such claims has been poorly distributed. This is partly due to the majority of the prolific director’s films being […]
Boy Erased (2018) Not Quite Erased, But Not Fully Drawn (Review)
One of the defining depictions of evil on film, for me, is Robert Mitchum’s character in Night of the Hunter. It’s the way he balances menace and clumsiness, a wolf who is also a Wile E. Coyote, slipping on bottles and suffering head injuries and yowling as his fingers jam […]
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (2018) the actor Melissa McCarthy always threatened to be (Review)
We live in an age where swathes of journalists get laid off at the drop of a hat, and where the idea of writing for a living seems more fantastic with every passing day. Writers get used to practicing a kind of stoic optimism: with no (monetary) reward or any […]
If Beale Street Could Talk – London Film Festival 2018
“I am equally moved by that moment in Jim Jarmusch’s Mystery Train when the young Japanese couple arrive in the train station in Memphis only to encounter what appears to be a homeless black man, a drifter, but who turns to them and speaks in Japanese. The interaction takes only a moment, […]
Roma to Peterloo – London Film Festival 2018
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 […]
Wild Rose – London Film Festival 2018
“No black ties (far from it!). Although members may complain about the ticket prices, they are at least no higher than ordinary West End cinemas— which, considering the expense of putting on a film festival, is more than reasonable. We are non-competitive, feeling that it is impossible to choose […] […]
Cold War (2018) Feels like Hollywood pre-code, unapologetically entertaining (Review)
He’s a musician, or maybe a musicologist, lightly burdened by Marcello Mastroianni-style ennui, touring post-war Poland, barely introduced in an opening montage as one of two government-appointed scouts listening to a series of home-grown Polish folk music talent. Maybe he’s holding some auditions, maybe he’s learning their traditions. We see […]
Apostasy (2017) a splash of cold water on the sometimes sleepy face of British filmmaking (Review)
At what point does the care and attention of a close-knit community become too close, evolving into a punishing system of abuse and control? What separates legitimate beliefs from the parasitic, overbearing decrees of an extremist cult? If you’re looking for ambiguous and equivocating answers to those questions, don’t watch […]