Umberto Lenzi is one of those directors whose reputation in the UK has been bent out of shape by the video nasties scandal. Since the Director of Public Prosecutions’ list of potentially obscene films has spent decades doubling as a watchlist for horror fans, Lenzi is best-known in this country […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Two New Criterions: Devi (1960) and The Thin Red Line (1998)(Review)
After early November’s Blu-Ray of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox, Criterion UK release a pair of movies unconnected save for their very different approaches to making a film about faith. And that’s “a film about faith” rather than a “faith-based film”. The latter is generally used as a synonym for […]
Dementia 13 (1962): the B-Horror that gave us The Godfather (Review)
Roger Corman is generally remembered as a net positive for movie history. As the legend goes, his American International Pictures gave an early break to a generation of actors, writers and directors who went on to reshape American cinema in the 1970s. The actual films, though, are often overlooked in […]
We Need to Do Something (2021) Ambitious lockdown Horror with one twist too many (Review)
The title of Sean King O’Grady’s movie, released on digital platforms by Blue Finch, is a statement of purpose. It’s one of a growing number of movies made during lockdown, by creatives who’d seen larger projects cancelled during the pandemic and decided that they needed to… well, you’re ahead of […]
No Man of God (2021): not the Bundy biopic you may be fearing (Review)
Amber Sealey’s first film, A + D, was a microbudget affair set in a London flat and starring the director herself. Her latest, No Man of God, is about Ted Bundy, one of America’s most obsessed-over criminals, and features Elijah Wood and Robert Patrick. That sounds like a big step […]
Love & Basketball (2000): and a lot more besides (Review)
Auteurism isn’t very popular these days, even amongst auteurs. The current fashion seems to have swung back to a pre-1950s model of treating the studio as the defining creative voice of a film, which can be interesting – auteur theory itself originated in such an environment – but it comes […]
Violation (2020): hardcore revenge without the toxicity (Review)
The rape-revenge movie: what is to be done? Four decades ago, as the video nasties scare began to percolate, rape-revenge narratives joined “Italian cannibal movies” and “concentration camp exploitation” in the list of topics least likely to be officially approved for release. Now, our most accomplished female screenwriters and directors […]
La Dolce Vita (1960): when Fellini became Fellini-esque (Review)
On April 11th 1953, the body of aspiring actress Wilma Montesi was found on a beach outside of Rome. Her death, which remains unsolved, sparked one of the first major tabloid scandals in Italian history, as journalists from monarchist and Communist papers alike suggested the police’s apparent inability to catch […]
Death Screams (1982) and the essential innocence of early slashers (Review)
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is one of those American TV shows which, like Little House on the Prairie and Leave it to Beaver, is remembered as a euphemism for cloying wholesomeness more than an actual show. If you were told that its main child star David Nelson later […]
Johnny Guitar (1954) Oh, Vienna! (Review)
To the unconverted, Westerns are a predictable genre in which the same archetypal characters, settings and situations recur over and over again. To fans, Westerns are a fabulously varied genre in which the same archetypal characters, settings and situations can be combined in an infinite number of original variations. Think, […]