If there’s anyone out there who still doubts that Michelangelo Antonioni was a genius, consider this: he made the British overcome their prurience. On its 1966 release, his classic Blow-Up was a substantial hit in the UK among audiences who were not primarily interested in watching the latest film from […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The Feast (2021): the first Welsh-language horror movie doesn’t want for ambition (Cinema Review)
The BFI currently determines which films are eligible to receive tax breaks using two tests: whether a film is British-financed, and whether it is “culturally British”. Breaking that down further, it is straightforward to think of films that are culturally Scottish, culturally English or culturally Irish, but very hard to […]
Summertime (1955): David Lean’s favourite David Lean film (Blu-Ray Review)
Asked to name a David Lean film, most people would plump for Lawrence of Arabia or The Bridge on the River Kwai before they mentioned Summertime. Yet this holiday romance was Lean’s favourite of his own movies, and Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray suggests plenty of reasons why. Before he became […]
Larks on a String (1969): saved from the scrapheap of censorship (Review)
Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String, released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Second Run, won the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlin International Film Festival – an impressive feat for any film, but a remarkable one when you consider Menzel’s film was twenty-one years old at that point. […]
Wayfinder (2022): a wilderness that could do with more wildness (Review)
Normally, when reviewing a debut feature, it’s fruitless to look to the director’s back catalogue for comparison points. Either they’re so new that there aren’t any, or you relegate yourself to pointing out the obvious. (Try not to fall off your chair, but I think Emma Seligman’s 2018 short Shiva […]
Théo and the Metamorphosis (2021): uncomfortable for the right reasons (Cinema Review)
Among the many veterans making a comeback at the moment – Kate Bush, the cast of the original Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs from the original Jurassic Park – let’s take a moment to celebrate caves. They’ve been around forever – literally – but they’re hotter than ever now, with Robert […]
Moon 66 Questions (2021): subtly strange carer’s story that resists easy comparisons (Cinema Review)
Recently there’s been a surprising number of films about people with degenerative diseases, an apparently uncommercial subgenre that’s actually produced a number of sleeper hits and Oscar winners. If Jacqueline Lentzou’s Moon, 66 Questions doesn’t join them on the Kodak Theater stage, it will be for the noblest of reasons: […]
Outside the Law (1920): dated depictions can’t overshadow Tod Browning’s genius (Review)
Readers, what emotion comes over you when I ask you to imagine Lon Chaney playing a character called “Ah Wing”? A shudder of unease, I’d imagine, one of a very different kind to the shudders he produced in his more famous horror roles. And yet it’s worth indulging Outside the […]
Enter the Void (2009): a city symphony in 21st-century neon (Review)
Gaspar Noé’s new film Vortex, currently on release in UK cinemas, is shocking audiences in perhaps the only way Noé can shock people at this juncture: by removing his usual graphic violence and unsimulated sex in favour of a sensitive exploration of dementia and death. There is another film called […]
Luminous Procuress (1971): if an alien made a film about human sexuality, it would look like this (Review)
It’s quite an achievement to live your life as a work of art. Steven Arnold, whose film Luminous Procuress has been restored and reissued on Blu-Ray by Second Run, seems to have achieved it. His star and childhood friend, the performance artist Pandora, recalls his bedroom being decorated “like Louis […]