It’s strange, on the face of it, that there aren’t more movies about Vikings. Television has exploited this gap in the market with shows like – well, like Vikings, obviously – but there’s still a puzzling absence of Norsemen on the big screen. Puzzling because this should be obviously cinematic […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Vampir Cuadecuc (1971) A Surprisingly Sensual and Beautiful avant-garde Vampire Movie (Review)
Sometime in the early 2000s, a Peruvian government spokesman was forced to testily deny online rumours that some of the country’s cabinet were vampires. “A government cannot go around sucking the blood of its people”, the spokesman claimed, inviting the obvious rejoinder; which government has ever refrained from this? The […]
Certain Women (2016) a grown-up, unironic, realist film about ordinary people going through ordinary challenges (Review)
It’s always an interesting statement of values when a prestige home video label decides to release a recent film. Everyone agrees on Kurosawa, Lang and Welles, but which modern director would you put in their company? In America, the Criterion Collection has got behind Wes Anderson so consistently that it’s […]
Song to Song
Released on DVD and download by StudioCanal, the history of Terrence Malick’s Song to Song goes back to the summer of 2011, when attendees at Austin, Texas’s famous South by Southwest music festival saw the director filming Ryan Gosling and Rooney Mara in the crowds. Malick had just won the […]
Every Picture Tells a Story: The Art Films of James Scott (1967-84) (Review)
For all that James Scott’s name is on the cover, the main selling point of the BFI’s new archive collection Every Picture Tells a Story is the remarkable range of artists he filmed. There’s David Hockney, arguably the only living British painter whose name means something to the general public. […]
Lord of the Flies (1963) Literature Classic lives and dies on the shoulder of its child actors (Review)
Among those of us who value books as discrete physical objects – which is slightly more of us than is comfortable for Amazon’s share price – film tie-in editions are a wearying necessity, a crude imposition of a completely different style of art for crass commercial reasons. There are some […]
Joe Orton: Loot (1970) & Entertaining Mr. Sloane (1970) (Review)
“I was plunged into the dumps for weeks after seeing Entertaining Mr. Sloane”, wrote Mrs. Edna Welthorpe of the late Joe Orton’s most famous play. She was even less fond of its follow-up: “I saw Loot with my young niece. We both fled from the theatre in horror and amazement […]
Touchez Pas au Grisbi (1954) Jean Gabin and Jacques Becker’s Radical Chic (Review)
There’s an anecdote Martin Scorsese often tells about his childhood that turns up in some variant or other in most of his gangster films. It concerns the future director walking around Little Italy with his mother, noticing that some people seemed to be wearing better clothes and driving better cars […]
J’Accuse (1938) World War I Historical Epic with Silent Film and Grindhouse Brio (Review)
In literature, the phrase J’accuse is most associated with Émile Zola, who used it for the title of an essay accusing the French government of corruption and anti-Semitism in the case of Alfred Dreyfus. (Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer, was charged with treason in a clumsy attempt to cover up […]
The Levelling (2016) An incredible, sympathetic film to the plight of the modern farmer (Review)
It would be wrong to say British film hasn’t dealt with the countryside, but it certainly hasn’t dealt with it in any depth. For the first half-century or so of British cinema it might as well have been a painted backdrop, just some pretty, quintessentially British scenery against which melodramas […]