The title of Joshua Bonnetta and J.P. Sniadecki’s experimental documentary, El Mar La Mar, released on Blu-Ray by Second Run, refers to a passage in Anabasis by Xenophon of Athens. A chronicle of the victorious campaign of ten thousand Greek mercenaries to secure the Persian throne for their employer Cyrus […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The Lukas Moodysson Collection (1998-2013)(Review)
The test of a good box set is not so much the quality of each individual film, but whether it gives you new contexts to appreciate the films you may not otherwise take to. Arrow’s new Blu-Ray set of every fiction feature directed by Lukas Moodysson deserves points for completeness, […]
Mississippi Masala (1991): cross-culture romance with a young Denzel Washington (Review)
Mira Nair’s Mississippi Masala, released on Blu-Ray by Criterion UK, is a nice film. Befuddlingly so, in fact. Nair’s only prior feature was Salaam Bombay! in 1988, a story of Indian street children gritty enough to have critics hailing her as the heir to Vittorio de Sica. Her second film […]
Rimini (2022): looking for the shaft of light in Ulrich Seidl’s sensibilities (Review)
There are countless horror movies that exploit the particular uncanniness of a holiday resort in winter, but none of them have featured a monster quite like Richie Bravo. The anti-hero of Ulrich Seidl’s latest film, Rimini, he’s a hulking, middle-aged lounge singer of limitless appetites and venality. After singing another […]
Father Earth (2022): big issues tackled in Graham Fellows’s small-scale fashion (Review)
There is a school of thought that, if you’re going to make a film with one obvious vulnerability, you should acknowledge it as soon as possible in order to disarm your critics. Anyone making a film about climate change in 2022 will know exactly what the naysayers will come out […]
The Power of the Dog (2021) An inspirational Western for those with the patience to ride with it (Blu-Ray Review)
The word “literary” stalks descriptions of Jane Campion’s work like “quirky” does Wes Anderson’s, so let’s top-and-tail this review of Criterion’s Blu-Ray of her most recent film with some book talk. The most pleasingly unexpected extra here is an interview with Annie Proulx, who mentions getting a letter from The […]
Son of the White Mare (1981): a one-man mission to demonstrate animation’s possibilities (Review)
If Eureka Masters of Cinema’s new Blu-Ray release just contained Marcell Jankovics’s 1981 film Son of the White Mare, that would be enough for an unqualified recommendation. Revered in his native Hungary after making the nation’s first animated feature – of which more later – Jankovics’s work has not always […]
Tales of Unease (1970): paperback horror brought to life in an unjustly forgotten series (Review)
Let’s address that title first. As far as horror anthologies go, 1970’s LWT miniseries Tales of Unease might be guilty of under-promising; not Tales of Terror, or Tales of Slaughter, just something to make you a bit uneasy. Two years earlier, BBC Two had given us Late Night Horror, a […]
Gothic Fantastico: Four Italian Tales of Terror (1963/66)(Blu-Ray Review)
Horror, as a genre, flows from the Gothic like a river – but not all rivers flow in straight lines. In its heyday, a Gothic novel might mean the Gothic adventures of Ann Radcliffe or the Gothic romances of the Brontë sisters. Now, though, the term is unshakeably associated with […]
The Amusement Park (1975): George A Romero’s lost film comes back from the dead (Blu-Ray Review)
Of course, a man like George A Romero would leave us with one final shock. When he died in 2017, it seemed like his final film was Survival of the Dead, a middling 2009 entry into the zombie genre he redefined with his immortal 1968 debut Night of the Living […]