The singer/songwriter Ethel Cain recently kicked off a minor cultural debate by saying she was sick of irony. “There is such a loss of sincerity, and everything has to be a joke all the time”, she complained, making me feel deeply relieved for her: at least the 26-year-old Cain wasn’t […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The Fisher King (1991): Robin Williams’s best role in Terry Gilliam’s most accessible film
Even now, at a point when the image of the buccaneering, risk-taking, out-on-a-limb male genius auteur is at a fairly low ebb, it feels taboo to say you like one of those artists’ more commercial works. Terry Gilliam, a man more buccaneering, risk-taking etc. etc. than most, made The Fisher […]
Doctor Who A-Z #36: The Evil of the Daleks (1967)
Episode one of The Evil of the Daleks sets up an entertaining and unique adventure. For the first time since the Hartnell years – maybe since The Ark? – we pick up directly from a cliffhanger at the end of the previous story as the Doctor and Jamie chase the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #35: The Faceless Ones (1967)
The Patrick Troughton era had no right to start off as well as it did. It’s not just that regenerating the Doctor was an insane gamble to begin with, though it was. It’s that Troughton tumbles into what seemed to be another season of William Hartnell just two stories in […]
Doctor Who A-Z #34: The Macra Terror (1967)
I’ve complained, perhaps a little too much, about the difficulties of experiencing missing stories, so let’s raise our glass to BBC Video’s range of animated reconstructions by looking at perhaps the greatest of their works. By all accounts, the titular monsters in The Macra Terror didn’t look good. They don’t […]
Son of Adam (London International Fantastic Film Fest 2024)
The late film critic Manny Faber had an evocative phrase for the kind of movies he preferred. He called them “termite art”, as opposed to the “white elephant art” that proliferates in awards seasons and major festivals. The termite artist was small and unobtrusive, spurning the flash, technique and classicism […]
Doctor Who A-Z #33: The Moonbase (1967)
The Second Doctor’s natural habitat is the edge of the frame. In stories like Fury from the Deep he scurries around in the background, cheerfully letting this week’s guest cast underestimate him until the time comes to deliver the coup de grace. There’s a bit of that in The Moonbase, […]
Doctor Who A-Z #32: The Underwater Menace (1967)
The Underwater Menace is, by most estimations, rubbish. Patrick Troughton knew it when they were filming, and nobody has contradicted him since. In most of Doctor Who Magazine‘s occasional polls it ranks in the bottom ten stories of all time, which is almost impressive. The script, credited to Geoffrey Orme, is so […]
Doctor Who A-Z #31: The Highlanders (1966-7)
If, like me, you’re fascinated by the question of why Doctor Who abandoned ‘pure’ historical stories, The Highlanders offers something like the perfect test conditions to run an experiment. This is the last time pure historicals were a regular part of the series’ repertoire, rather than a decades-later experiment in […]
Super Spies and Secret Lies: Three Undercover Classics from Shaw Brothers (1966-9) (Review)
Have you ever seen a spy movie from Hong Kong? My guess is, if you have any interest in Far Eastern cinema at all, you probably have. Enter the Dragon, no less, sees Bruce Lee going undercover at the behest of British intelligence; Jackie Chan and Stephen Chow have also […]