As a child of the ‘90s, it’s great to see the media icons of my youth returning to the spotlight. After comebacks from Jeff Goldblum and Janet Jackson, it’s Ötzi the Iceman’s turn. His hollow eyes and emaciated frame were inescapable in 1991, when his five-thousand-year-old corpse was found in […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Separate Tables (1963) sophisticated fun save for some inadvertent unpleasantness
One of the main extras on the BFI’s new dual-format reissue of Separate Tables is an archive commentary by director Delbert Mann, who died in 2007. Mann is still probably best known for his Oscar-winning 1955 debut Marty, but he’d worked extensively in television beforehand. Back then the medium was […]
The Miraculous Virgin (1966) a virtuoso exercise of imagery & poetry (Review)
Štefan Uher’s The Miraculous Virgin, released on Blu-Ray for the first time anywhere in the world by Second Run Films, is one of those 1960s Czechoslovak films that’s so freeform in its plotting, so rapturously visual, that it’s hard to imagine it having a script, let alone a source novel. […]
Under the Tree (2017) Icelandic Black Comedy fails to live up to its early promise (Review)
Released in cinemas by Eureka Pictures, Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurđsson’s Icelandic black comedy Under the Tree begins with an inspired contemporary take on an old joke. Atli, played by Steinthór Hróar Steinthórsson, is watching a sex tape of himself with his ex-girlfriend when his wife walks in. Panicked, he closes the […]
F for Fake (1973) Orson Welles’s beguiling, adventurous art documentary swansong (Review)
“I started at the top”, Orson Welles quips in F for Fake, “and have been working my way down ever since”. After the great man’s death in 1985 Welles’s gag became something worryingly close to consensus. Obituary after obituary tutted about what a shame it was that he never lived up […]
Samuel Fuller at Columbia (1937-61)(Review)
There are two schools of thought on what makes a good box set. The first is what you might call the blockbuster principle: just assemble as impressive a collection of hits as you can. Certainly, that works – there’s a reason there are so many anthologies of Hitchcock and Coen […]
Black Peter (1964) The origins of Czech New Wave’s greatest export (Review)
Visiting the local co-op to see his sixteen-year-old son at work, a father barks angrily “That’s not working! That’s just standing and looking!” But there’s a value to standing and looking when you’re employed – as the boy, Petr, is – as a trainee store detective. Miloš Forman’s Black Peter, […]
Dark River (2017) … And the continued Ascendancy of Clio Barnard (Review)
She’s got armfuls of good reviews and her films have opened at Cannes, but it still feels like people don’t recognise how good Clio Barnard is. Among her peers, Andrea Arnold is the heir apparent of social realist cinema, Ben Wheatley has the genre fans in his corner and Peter […]
Jubilee (1978) Pure Punk and Pure Derek Jarman (Review)
And so time marches on, stopping only to produce ironies. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, its very title a sarcastic reference to Queen Elizabeth II’s twenty-five years in office, is reissued by the BFI on dual format for its own ruby anniversary. The disc is released a week or so after the […]
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) The Antidote to Biopic Fatigue (Review)
An extraordinary film even by the standards of Criterion’s UK catalogue, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is your go-to film to counter accusations that biopics are inherently stuffy, stylistically conservative Oscar-bait. And it’s all thanks to Hank Williams. After surviving the excesses of the ’70s New Hollywood, […]