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, […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
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 […]
Pariah (2011): the most influential 2010s film you haven’t seen (Review)
You don’t get anything if you don’t ask. This new Criterion UK Blu-Ray of Dee Rees’s debut film Pariah came from a request she made when the company met with her about a forthcoming release of her later film Mudbound. Rees suggested that Pariah would make more sense as part […]
The Babadook (2014): the reigning champ of modern horror gets the reissue it deserves (Review)
Is seven years too early to call something a classic? Second Sight are hoping it isn’t, with this hulking 4K remaster of Jennifer Kent’s 2014 feature debut The Babadook clocking in with the weight of extras they’ve previously given to canonical works like Walkabout and The Colour of Pomegranates. The […]
Straight Shooting (1917) and Hell Bent (1918): John Ford quietly establishes the Western’s essentials (review)
The history of silent cinema is famously patchy, and it’s not surprising when you look at how these films were churned out. Straight Shooting, the first film in Eureka Masters of Cinema’s double-bill of silent-era John Ford films, is the earliest surviving film from the future director of The Searchers. […]
But I’m a Cheerleader! (1999): the best John Waters film Waters never made (Review)
It’s all very well if you’re a Jack or a Sarah, apparently, but us Grahams have few iconic movie characters who share our name. Even more reason, then, to cheer for Lionsgate’s new Blu-Ray of Jamie Babbit’s cult comedy But I’m a Cheerleader, which gives us a Graham for the […]
Merrily We Go to Hell (1932): a devil of a time with a future star (Review)
It was a truism, once, that Hollywood portrayals of alcoholism were glib, comic affairs until Billy Wilder made The Long Weekend. While nothing can take away the quality of Wilder’s film, one of the pleasures of living at this particular moment in history – yes, there are some – is […]
The Silence Before Bach (2007) and Mudanza (2008) (Review)
There’s a running bit in Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle’s most irritating film, where the title character repeatedly explains the importance of making phones that are slightly smaller and more functional than other phones by comparing them to major flashpoints in art history – Dylan going electric, say, or the premiere […]