The theme of the stressed-out, materialistic big city professional finding renewal and redemption in a small town is one mainstream cinema goes back to time and time again, and it usually makes my teeth itch. If big-name American directors really found Midwestern small towns as life-affirming as they claim to, […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Ishanou (1990) Indian regional cinema probes the mystery of faith
Standard screenwriting advice has it that nothing confuses an audience faster than unclear character motivations, but some of the most powerful stories succeed by refusing to do exactly that. We never learn what made Daniel Plainview so embittered, or why Iago hates Othello, and nobody worth listening to would say […]
Noise (2017): getting to the truth of true crime
Sakka is a streaming service whose mission is to provide a global platform for independent Japanese films. This would have been laudable enough back in the DVD era, when a small handful of labels decided which non-Anglophone films would be distributed in the UK. It’s even more vital these days, […]
Outside the Blue Box: The Importance of Being Earnest (2025)
Welcome to a new feature in which a rotating cast of Geek Show writers look at what the stars, writers and directors of Doctor Who get up to outside the show. We gave you a little taster of this last Christmas, but for the full experience we recommend signing up […]
Doctor Who A-Z #69: The Green Death (1973)
Classic seasons of Doctor Who aren’t designed as a holistic experience like the new seasons are, but as far back as the Troughton era there’s been a sense that a season finale should offer something big. Quite what that bigness involves changes over time. The Troughton finales still mostly register […]
Doctor Who A-Z #68: Planet of the Daleks (1973)
Planet of the Daleks is the penultimate story – Invasion of the Dinosaurs is the last – to have material missing from the archives, specifically the colour negative of episode three. A colourised version has been made, but I watched a version where this one episode was in black and […]
Doctor Who A-Z #67: Frontier in Space (1973)
I think I love the flour the most. The apparent hijacking of a human ship by alien mercenaries, the one that kick-starts this story and nearly causes a war between solar systems, isn’t a raid on a ship carrying space marines or photon torpedoes or anything like that. It’s an […]
Doctor Who A-Z #66: Carnival of Monsters (1973)
Carnival of Monsters seems to be the Third Doctor story that people who don’t like the Third Doctor’s era as a whole can get behind. There’s a very obvious reason for this, and like all very obvious reasons it isn’t quite right. Fans will tell you that its distinctive quality […]
Doctor Who A-Z #65: The Three Doctors (1972-3)
We catch our hero in the eye of the storm. After a career beginning in the 1960s, the new decade has been phenomenally good to him so far. A new incarnation has seen him soar to even greater heights of popularity, discarding some of the quainter fringes of his Sixties […]
Hardboiled: Three Pulp Thrillers by Alain Corneau (1976-81)
The thing about Alain Corneau’s crime thrillers is, for all they take their time telling a story, they let you know what they’re really about straight away. Each of the three titles collected in this Radiance Films Blu-Ray set kicks off with a sequence or shot that immediately flags up […]