Previously, the only film by the Romanian director Radu Jude to receive a general release in the UK is Aferim!, an eccentric, stylized take on Western genre tropes that slowly reveals itself to be a commentary on a historical atrocity little-known outside Eastern Europe. Now, Second Run have released his […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Anna and the Apocalypse: equal parts toe-tapping and head-smashing (Review)
For many unsuspecting viewers, the first shock in Anna and the Apocalypse will come before a single zombie has turned up: five minutes in, the characters start singing. Despite horror arguably having a stronger relationship with original music than any other genre – go ahead, imagine Halloween or Suspiria without […]
The Song of Bernadette: a film of faith, but not blind faith (Review)
There’s a common lament among certain American Christian bloggers that Hollywood doesn’t make movies with spiritual content like it used to, which to this writer’s eyes does a disservice to interesting modern films about Christianity – The Tree of Life, Silence, First Reformed et al – and also glosses over […]
To Sleep With Anger: the eternally youthful Charles Burnett (Review)
The 2003 Martin Scorsese-produced HBO anthology series The Blues featured a lot of big-name directors offering their take on America’s centrally important musical genre. Yet most critics agreed that the best episode wasn’t directed by Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders or Scorsese himself. It was the episode Warming by the Devil’s […]
Kolobos (1999) soft satire, but hard gore (Review)
Let’s spin back to summer, 1999; Big Brother launches in the Netherlands, the public is slowly becoming acclimatised to words like “webcam” and “JPEG”, and the two big horror talking points – Ringu and The Blair Witch Project – take the genre’s regular voyeuristic concerns into an age where VHS […]
The Boys In The Band (1970) After Stonewall, Before Pride (Review)
He may be associated with the tough, transgressive American cinema of the 1970s, but there’s a part of William Friedkin that would have made a first-rate Old Hollywood journeyman. Peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader have recently been making personal, self-penned projects, but Friedkin’s 21st-century career renaissance came […]
Shoah The Four Sisters (2018) Chamber Pieces From A Historical Nightmare (Review)
Even before his death in July 2018, Claude Lanzmann was always easier to imagine in retrospect. He remained a public figure into his nineties, and a valuable one at that: thoughtful, eloquent, combative when necessary. His work, though, was dominated by two time periods. The first was the period from […]
Opera (1987) Argento Is No Ordinary Horror Director And [This] No Ordinary Horror Film (Review)
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Cult Films have quickly made a name for themselves in the home release market as Italian cinema specialists – but very much at the Fellini/De Sica end of that country’s output, which on the surface makes them a strange choice to reissue Dario Argento’s brutal horror Opera on Blu-Ray. Those […]
Josie (2018): … To Be Bad You Have To Recognise That You’re Bad (Review)
As my colleague Rob Simpson keeps having to point out, a film doesn’t need likeable characters to be good. It doesn’t even need smart characters. There’s a whole subgenre of noir fiction from Jim Thompson through to the Coen brothers which takes knuckle-dragging characters doing repellent things and alchemises them into […]
Texas Adios (1966) A glimpse of the Spaghetti Westerns yet to come (Review)
Say one thing for Texas Adios, the 1966 spaghetti Western reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow Video; it doesn’t hang around. A friend of mine likes to needle me by describing Westerns as a genre where you spend eighty minutes waiting for one action scene, but Texas Adios’s first action scene […]