It’s been a rough decade for clowns, with everything from the re-emergence of Pennywise to the wave of 2016 real-life clown sightings tarnishing the image of these floppy-shoed circus mainstays. The nearest thing to a sympathetic clown in popular culture has been Joaquin Phoenix’s reading of The Joker, and yet […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Transmission (Frightfest 2023) (Review)
The “lost media” trope, a centrally important one in online horror fiction, seems to have had its old-media coming-out party this year, with lost episodes and unfinished films turning up in everything from Boots Riley’s Amazon Prime series I’m a Virgo to Graham Hughes’s new film Hostile Dimensions (also showing at FrightFest 2023). Now […]
Mancunian Man: The Legendary Life of Cliff Twemlow (FrightFest 2023) (Review)
Jake West’s new documentary, Mancunian Man, opens with a quote from its subject, the late director, actor, bouncer and bodybuilder Cliff Twemlow: “It is far better to be a resident on the brink of hell than spend a whole life in pursuit of a mythical heaven“. Which is an odd […]
Hostile Dimensions & HERD (Frightfest 2023)(Review)
HOSTILE DIMENSIONS After Death of a Vlogger, Graham Hughes takes another stab at making a distinctly modern found-footage film, and it begins with what you might call a Blair Witch speedrun. A pair of documentarians exploring a derelict house find something uncanny and disappear without a trace. It’s then revealed […]
Film Noir Collection Vol. 3: Calcutta, Ride the Pink Horse, Outside the Law, The Female Animal (1946-1958) (Blu-Ray Review)
Arrow’s first film noir box set, released in 2020, included bona fide cult classics like The Big Combo and Force of Evil, as well as deeper cuts from master directors like Fritz Lang. The third volume collects four titles which will be unknown to all but the most forensic of […]
Skinamarink (II) (2022): TikTok’s favourite liminal horror takes its Blu-Ray bow (review)
At a time when major streaming services are casually erasing whole shows from existence, we should be grateful to Acorn Media for their continuing run of Blu-Ray releases of Shudder exclusives. It also opens up one of those questions of format that a certain kind of Bazin-besotted film theorist loves […]
Le Mépris (1963): the odd couple Godard and Bardot make a classic (Review)
Brigitte Anne-Marie Bardot started acting in 1952, at the age of 17. By the end of that decade she was the most famous woman in France, for her films, her music and the gleefully-reported-on turmoil of her private life. Among actresses of this era, only Marilyn Monroe was more famous. […]
Smooth Talk (1985): should now be considered an American classic (Review)
For a reissue of a quiet, low-key movie that isn’t all that well-known, Criterion’s new Blu-Ray of Joyce Chopra’s feature debut Smooth Talk has to do a lot. First off, it has to contribute to correcting the gender imbalance in Criterion’s library, although it isn’t shouldering that burden alone. Over […]
Red Sun (1970): Between the Commune and the comic-book (Blu-Ray Review)
There are many things you need to check before making a movie; cast availability, contracts, and filming permits. “The consent of a Leftist commune” is not usually one of them, but then there aren’t many filming environments quite like post-war Germany. Rudolf Thome’s Red Sun, newly released on Blu-Ray by […]
The Hot Spot (1990): more fun than eating cotton candy barefoot (Blu-Ray Review)
If, as Philip Larkin famously wrote, “sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three”, then film noir does not stand as one of the beneficiaries. The classic noir cycle had burned itself out five years earlier with Touch of Evil and Kiss Me Deadly, both of which took the genre’s usual overheated […]