“Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you?” asks Tony Hancock in Hancock’s Half Hour. “Did she die in vain?” Those in need of a refresher as to what the thirteenth-century bill of rights – the closest thing Britain has to a Constitution – actually means are encouraged to watch The […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The Halfway House: beguiling Ealing, with hints of later ghost stories (Review)
Who’s up for a ghost story at Christmas? Plenty of people, judging by the British television schedules, with adaptations of MR James and Susan Hill jostling for position alongside Peaky Blinders creator Steven Knight’s revisionist A Christmas Carol. The dark, chilly, rainy nights lend themselves perfectly to a fireside tale, […]
Moonrise Kingdom: Revel in the artificiality! (Review)
Wes Anderson’s films always have a sense of existing outside of time, in an indefinably old-fashioned present. It makes a perverse sort of sense, then, that when he finally made one set in the 1960s it stood out for not having the Kinks and the Rolling Stones on the soundtrack. […]
Rabid (2019): mutating to its heart’s content (Review)
While writing his 1977 film Rabid, David Cronenberg had a crisis of confidence. In Chris Rodley’s book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, he remembers saying to his producer John Dunning: “…I just woke up this morning and realised this is ridiculous. Do you know what this movie’s about? This woman grows a […]
Journey to the Beginning of Time: an astonishing arsenal of animator’s tricks (Review)
This is the fourth time Second Run have put out a film by the Czech director and animator Karel Zeman, and just like the others – A Jester’s Tale, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen and Invention for Destruction – this one makes me wish I’d seen it as a child. It’s […]
The Third Wife: an unsensational film that’s caused a big fuss (Review)
It’s customary to wait until the end of a review before telling the reader if they should go and see a film or not. In the case of The Third Wife – out now on Blu-Ray from Eureka’s Montage Pictures imprint – the matter may be a little more urgent. […]
Inseminoid: Dynamic, Provocative, Extravagantly Tasteless (Review)
In his novel The Place of Dead Roads, William S Burroughs suggests that a British space programme never took off for cultural reasons; as soon as we got to the moon and realised there was no-one there to patronise, apparently, we’d give up. Those curious as to what Burroughs might […]
A Case for a Rookie Hangman: as thoroughly bananas as the title suggests (Review)
There aren’t many literary adaptations which begin with an apology to the source author – although there are plenty that should. But Pavel Juráček’s A Case for a Rookie Hangman, reissued on Blu-Ray by Second Run, is not like most films. It begins by promising “If Swift should turn in his […]
The Captor: True Crime a la Blumhouse (Review)
The last time Ethan Hawke played a role as flamboyantly as he does in Robert Budreau’s new film, he was playing a character named “Jolly the Pimp” in a Luc Besson space opera. Hawke’s Kaj Hansson is a stetsoned, Bob Dylan-obsessed ball of energy from the moment he walks into […]
How I Won the War: much more than just Beatles trivia (Review)
Louis Malle’s advice for directors trying to make films overseas was to start with a genre piece; he’d began his American career with the tough social drama Pretty Baby, and he later wondered if he should have instead done something in a less realist register, where people would forgive the […]