You may not think of Wes Anderson fandom as a rough-and-tumble affair, but I’ve seen violent gang brawls – Louis Vuitton satchels thrown in anger, men savagely beaten with their own powder-blue loafers – erupt over the issue of what the Texan director’s worst film is. For me, it’s his […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Tales from the Urban Jungle: Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) (Review)
Film noir’s spiritual home has always been the streets. With The Naked City, though, Jules Dassin made that spiritual home into a literal home. Previous films had cooked up bustling metropolitan locations on Hollywood sound-stages, but Dassin’s film was the first film to take advantage of the new lightweight cameras […]
Two Martial Arts Films: Russian Raid (2020) & Winners and Sinners (1983)
In its own way, the martial arts movie is as broad a church as anything. Other genres have their stock situations and standard plot beats, but the only beats martial arts cinema cares about are the ones delivered to the side of a goon’s skull. As long as the fighting […]
Lost in America (1985): some kind of comic masterpiece (Review)
Introducing himself to various people on a road trip across America, David Howard explains his project as follows: “We’ve dropped out of society”. Yet the first stop he and his wife Linda make on their journey is Las Vegas, a town whose inhabitants live, as the Joker so sagely informs […]
Breeder (2020): reclaiming the torture horror? (Review)
The 2000s cycle of torture-themed horror – commonly referred to as “torture porn”, and my, doesn’t that term get you some looks when you casually use it around people who aren’t obsessed with minor horror subgenres – may be the only cinematic trend brought down by a billboard. Advertising for […]
Host (2020): as good on Blu-Ray as it was streaming (Review)
The call is coming from inside the computer! Horror fans have fought and largely won the battle for their preferred genre to be respected as art. It’s worth acknowledging, though, that part of the genre’s power comes from how disreputable it can be. The subterranean status of horror licenses it […]
Charade (1963) one perfect story-telling machine (Review)
For a decade which produced some of the most enduring, beloved hits in American cinema history – everything from The Sound of Music to Psycho – it can be hard to love 1960s Hollywood in toto. The Golden Age was over, the 1970s New Hollywood was yet to be born, […]
Rams (2020): not quite the GOAT, but a touching shaggy sheep story (Review)
Hollywood’s voracious consumption of other countries’ IP has made it easy to identify when a film has been Americanised, but what do we expect when a film transfers from Iceland to Australia? Grímur Hákonarson’s 2015 film Rams was voted the second-best Icelandic film of all time by the Icelandic website […]
A Rainy Day in New York (2019): and a grim day for Woody Allen fans (Review)
You might have missed it, but A Rainy Day in New York briefly became the first Woody Allen film to hit number one at the global box office. This is, admittedly, because it was May 2020 and nothing else was out – a strong showing in South Korea was enough […]
Liberté (2019) If you go down to the woods today… (Review)
There’s an image late on in Albert Serra’s Liberté which seems to contain something of the film in its entirety. A woman is walking through the woods, the scene of an orgy held by decadent aristocrats exiled from the court of France’s last king Louis XVI. She is in period […]