Normally, when reviewing a debut feature, it’s fruitless to look to the director’s back catalogue for comparison points. Either they’re so new that there aren’t any, or you relegate yourself to pointing out the obvious. (Try not to fall off your chair, but I think Emma Seligman’s 2018 short Shiva […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Théo and the Metamorphosis (2021): uncomfortable for the right reasons (Cinema Review)
Among the many veterans making a comeback at the moment – Kate Bush, the cast of the original Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs from the original Jurassic Park – let’s take a moment to celebrate caves. They’ve been around forever – literally – but they’re hotter than ever now, with Robert […]
Moon 66 Questions (2021): subtly strange carer’s story that resists easy comparisons (Cinema Review)
Recently there’s been a surprising number of films about people with degenerative diseases, an apparently uncommercial subgenre that’s actually produced a number of sleeper hits and Oscar winners. If Jacqueline Lentzou’s Moon, 66 Questions doesn’t join them on the Kodak Theater stage, it will be for the noblest of reasons: […]
Outside the Law (1920): dated depictions can’t overshadow Tod Browning’s genius (Review)
Readers, what emotion comes over you when I ask you to imagine Lon Chaney playing a character called “Ah Wing”? A shudder of unease, I’d imagine, one of a very different kind to the shudders he produced in his more famous horror roles. And yet it’s worth indulging Outside the […]
Enter the Void (2009): a city symphony in 21st-century neon (Review)
Gaspar Noé’s new film Vortex, currently on release in UK cinemas, is shocking audiences in perhaps the only way Noé can shock people at this juncture: by removing his usual graphic violence and unsimulated sex in favour of a sensitive exploration of dementia and death. There is another film called […]
Luminous Procuress (1971): if an alien made a film about human sexuality, it would look like this (Review)
It’s quite an achievement to live your life as a work of art. Steven Arnold, whose film Luminous Procuress has been restored and reissued on Blu-Ray by Second Run, seems to have achieved it. His star and childhood friend, the performance artist Pandora, recalls his bedroom being decorated “like Louis […]
Twisting the Knife: The Swindle (1997) and The Colour of Lies (1999)(Review)
Following on from February’s Lies and Deceit, Arrow have returned to the films of Claude Chabrol for their new box set Twisting the Knife. Twisting the Knife has a slightly different remit to Lies and Deceit; the former box set selected various films Chabrol directed between 1985 and 1994 but […]
The Big Racket (1976) & Heroin Busters (1977): two films by Enzo G Castellari (Review)
Enzo G Castellari is now best-known not for a film he directed but for a film he inspired: Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, which lifts its title from his 1978 war film The Inglorious Bastards. A more direct impact he had on movie history would be Keoma, the 1976 film he […]
In the Family (2011) and The Grief of Others (2015): two films by Patrick Wang (Review)
It’s rare, to say the least, for a director to go from having no films released in the UK to having his entire back catalogue made available overnight. But this is what’s happened to Patrick Wang, whose four features to date were released by Bulldog Film Distribution at selected cinemas […]
To Sleep So As To Dream (1986): silent Japanese dream detectives! (Review)
The fictional detective is a rational creature. As soon as detective stories were invented, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle were using their sleuths to reveal the mundane truth behind apparently supernatural events; the latter’s maxim that when you have eliminated the impossible, what remains – however improbable – […]