There is a school of thought that, if you’re going to make a film with one obvious vulnerability, you should acknowledge it as soon as possible in order to disarm your critics. Anyone making a film about climate change in 2022 will know exactly what the naysayers will come out […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The Power of the Dog (2021) An inspirational Western for those with the patience to ride with it (Blu-Ray Review)
The word “literary” stalks descriptions of Jane Campion’s work like “quirky” does Wes Anderson’s, so let’s top-and-tail this review of Criterion’s Blu-Ray of her most recent film with some book talk. The most pleasingly unexpected extra here is an interview with Annie Proulx, who mentions getting a letter from The […]
Son of the White Mare (1981): a one-man mission to demonstrate animation’s possibilities (Review)
If Eureka Masters of Cinema’s new Blu-Ray release just contained Marcell Jankovics’s 1981 film Son of the White Mare, that would be enough for an unqualified recommendation. Revered in his native Hungary after making the nation’s first animated feature – of which more later – Jankovics’s work has not always […]
Tales of Unease (1970): paperback horror brought to life in an unjustly forgotten series (Review)
Let’s address that title first. As far as horror anthologies go, 1970’s LWT miniseries Tales of Unease might be guilty of under-promising; not Tales of Terror, or Tales of Slaughter, just something to make you a bit uneasy. Two years earlier, BBC Two had given us Late Night Horror, a […]
Gothic Fantastico: Four Italian Tales of Terror (1963/66)(Blu-Ray Review)
Horror, as a genre, flows from the Gothic like a river – but not all rivers flow in straight lines. In its heyday, a Gothic novel might mean the Gothic adventures of Ann Radcliffe or the Gothic romances of the Brontë sisters. Now, though, the term is unshakeably associated with […]
The Amusement Park (1975): George A Romero’s lost film comes back from the dead (Blu-Ray Review)
Of course, a man like George A Romero would leave us with one final shock. When he died in 2017, it seemed like his final film was Survival of the Dead, a middling 2009 entry into the zombie genre he redefined with his immortal 1968 debut Night of the Living […]
Identification of a Woman (1982): Antonioni enters the ’80s, as provocative as ever (Review)
If there’s anyone out there who still doubts that Michelangelo Antonioni was a genius, consider this: he made the British overcome their prurience. On its 1966 release, his classic Blow-Up was a substantial hit in the UK among audiences who were not primarily interested in watching the latest film from […]
The Feast (2021): the first Welsh-language horror movie doesn’t want for ambition (Cinema Review)
The BFI currently determines which films are eligible to receive tax breaks using two tests: whether a film is British-financed, and whether it is “culturally British”. Breaking that down further, it is straightforward to think of films that are culturally Scottish, culturally English or culturally Irish, but very hard to […]
Summertime (1955): David Lean’s favourite David Lean film (Blu-Ray Review)
Asked to name a David Lean film, most people would plump for Lawrence of Arabia or The Bridge on the River Kwai before they mentioned Summertime. Yet this holiday romance was Lean’s favourite of his own movies, and Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray suggests plenty of reasons why. Before he became […]
Larks on a String (1969): saved from the scrapheap of censorship (Review)
Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String, released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Second Run, won the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlin International Film Festival – an impressive feat for any film, but a remarkable one when you consider Menzel’s film was twenty-one years old at that point. […]