The writing team of Bob Baker and Dave Martin were major contributors to the 1970s golden age of classic-series Doctor Who, yet they’ve never been embraced by the show’s fans as enthusiastically as contemporaries like Robert Holmes or Terrance Dicks. There’s a stereotype of them as ideas men, good at […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Roma Elastica (Fantastic Fest 2026)
Not, as Britons of a certain age may expect, a film about Justine Frischmann and the gang touring Italy, Roma Elastica is the latest film by Bertrand Mandico. If the name is unfamiliar, that’s no surprise. Mandico is one of the most unique, surprising and consistently entertaining voices in queer […]
Death Has No Master (Fantastic Fest 2026)
There is something drained, sickly, in the very colours of Jorge Thielen Armand’s film, which makes its way to Fantastic Fest from a successful Cannes premiere. I’m uncertain whether the film was shot digitally or on celluloid – whisper it around Christopher Nolan, but you can’t always tell these days […]
Phreaker (Fantastic Fest 2026)
Apparently it started with a whistle. A blind child from Richmond, Virginia, Josef Engressia, whistled down a phone line, heard a strange click, then realised he had free phone calls for life. This incident, which is dramatised in flashback in Adam Yorke’s debut film Phreaker, was the birth of “phone […]
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) review 2: the extras (1982-2024)
A review should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order. With that in mind, let’s start smack-bang in the middle of the extras for Radiance’s Histoire(s) du cinéma Blu-Ray, with 2×50 Years of French Cinema. A 1995 collaboration between Godard and his partner […]
Treasures from the Golestan Film Studio (1961-1974): the union that birthed Iranian cinema
They’ll never make me believe physical media is dead when packages like this exist. Specifically, I mean packages where the extras justify the price of the entire set on their own. The Golestan Film Studio was an independent studio established by Ebrahim Golestan in Shah-era Iran, one of the earliest […]
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998): review 1B – the history(s)
Among the many extras on discs two and three of Radiance Films’s Blu-Ray of Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du cinéma, there is a whole feature-length film. Chosen Moments from Histoire(s) du cinéma is exactly what it sounds like, a 2001 compression of the eight episodes into an eighty-minute film. Very good […]
Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998): review 1A – the stories
Jean-Luc Godard’s Historie(s) du cinéma, released on Blu-Ray in a limited edition extras-packed set by Radiance, is many things, but one of the things it isn’t is a history of cinema. The title is one of the bilingual puns Godard always delighted in, not least because they exclude monoglots from […]
The Ritual (1977): protested, lost and found, an incendiary Indian debut
It sounds like a horror movie, but it isn’t – well, not in a genre sense. The new Blu-Ray from Second Run is a film whose restoration was partly the work of Martin Scorsese’s World Cinema Project, partly the work of George Lucas’s Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation and partly the result […]
What to look out for at Fantastic Fest 2026
Born at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin, Texas, Fantastic Fest seems to spread its geographical and cultural remit a little further every year. There aren’t many genre festivals that can boast an advance screening of a likely Oscar contender, as well as restored silent movies and new films from Venezuela, […]