The title of Sean King O’Grady’s movie, released on digital platforms by Blue Finch, is a statement of purpose. It’s one of a growing number of movies made during lockdown, by creatives who’d seen larger projects cancelled during the pandemic and decided that they needed to… well, you’re ahead of […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
No Man of God (2021): not the Bundy biopic you may be fearing (Review)
Amber Sealey’s first film, A + D, was a microbudget affair set in a London flat and starring the director herself. Her latest, No Man of God, is about Ted Bundy, one of America’s most obsessed-over criminals, and features Elijah Wood and Robert Patrick. That sounds like a big step […]
Love & Basketball (2000): and a lot more besides (Review)
Auteurism isn’t very popular these days, even amongst auteurs. The current fashion seems to have swung back to a pre-1950s model of treating the studio as the defining creative voice of a film, which can be interesting – auteur theory itself originated in such an environment – but it comes […]
Violation (2020): hardcore revenge without the toxicity (Review)
The rape-revenge movie: what is to be done? Four decades ago, as the video nasties scare began to percolate, rape-revenge narratives joined “Italian cannibal movies” and “concentration camp exploitation” in the list of topics least likely to be officially approved for release. Now, our most accomplished female screenwriters and directors […]
La Dolce Vita (1960): when Fellini became Fellini-esque (Review)
On April 11th 1953, the body of aspiring actress Wilma Montesi was found on a beach outside of Rome. Her death, which remains unsolved, sparked one of the first major tabloid scandals in Italian history, as journalists from monarchist and Communist papers alike suggested the police’s apparent inability to catch […]
Death Screams (1982) and the essential innocence of early slashers (Review)
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is one of those American TV shows which, like Little House on the Prairie and Leave it to Beaver, is remembered as a euphemism for cloying wholesomeness more than an actual show. If you were told that its main child star David Nelson later […]
Johnny Guitar (1954) Oh, Vienna! (Review)
To the unconverted, Westerns are a predictable genre in which the same archetypal characters, settings and situations recur over and over again. To fans, Westerns are a fabulously varied genre in which the same archetypal characters, settings and situations can be combined in an infinite number of original variations. Think, […]
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Reassessment of Lynch’s ‘pathologically unpleasant’ film is complete (Review)
There was a time when people would have been surprised to see Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on Criterion, you know. Janet Maslin’s infamous New York Times pan (“brain-dead grotesquerie… pathologically unpleasant”) set the tone for the initial Cannes reception, and things did not get any better once it […]
All About Eve (1950) fasten your seatbelts, it’s a double-disc Criterion (Review)
Every era has one or two filmmakers who are so fashionable and so beloved that they introduce a whole generation to classic cinema just through name-dropping films in interviews. For my generation, it was the Coen brothers (and Quentin Tarantino, but since we’re not reviewing a 1970s rape-revenge film we’ll […]
Mirror (1975): Tarkovsky shows us his dreams, his memories and his lasting influence (Review)
Everyone who’s ever watched a classic film decades after its release will have had the same experience: you watch it, but you don’t just watch the film, you realise where a thousand other films, TV shows, songs and more got their inspiration from. That strange quality of deja vu is […]