For a company that’s over twenty years old, Second Run are finding a gratifying number of new strings to their bow. The largely untapped seams of world cinema they’ve been exploring recently include Indian independent films like The Circus Tent, Manthan and Ishanou, all of which reveal a very different […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Doctor Who A-Z #112: State of Decay (1980)
The fact that Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes’s version of Doctor Who was curtailed by force rather than run into the ground means it never had to go through the usual cycle of backlash and reassessment. Rather than fans getting sick of it, it was snatched away from us, meaning […]
Doctor Who A-Z #111: Full Circle (1980)
The Season 18 title sequence might just be Doctor Who’s weirdest. Not because it’s scary or experimental or anything like that – it’s just the culture shock of seeing something that’s so incredibly ’80s with Tom Baker’s face stuck in the middle of it. Despite my personal aversion to New […]
Doctor Who A-Z #110: Meglos (1980)
The first line of dialogue we hear on the planet Tigella is “It’s going to blow!”, and most fans begin watching Meglos thinking the exact same thing. It’s nobody’s favourite Season Eighteen story, and incoming script editor Christopher H Bidmead has always been upfront that he commissioned it in a hurry and […]
Doctor Who A-Z #109: The Leisure Hive (1980)
The tonal and stylistic gap between The Horns of Nimon and The Leisure Hive is enormous, and in fairness these stories were never meant to air one after the other. Season Seventeen was famously supposed to end with Shada, a six-part Douglas Adams story that was cancelled, half-recorded, after strikes […]
Long Live the Republic! (1965): World War II through the eyes of a Czech Fellini
Karel Kachyňa can be a hard director to pin down, which is probably for the best considering that, for a lot of his career, Czechoslovakia’s intelligence agencies were trying to do just that. Like a surprising amount of the country’s best directors, he did not flee after the Soviet invasion […]
Cutter’s Way (1981): Passer, paranoia and the *other* great Vietnam-vet vigilante movie
Asked about the ambiguous plot of his 1976 neo-noir Night Moves, Arthur Penn shrugged “We’re part of a generation that knows there are no solutions”. He didn’t reveal what was on his mind, but it’s pretty easy to guess. The generation who grew up in the 1960s and 70s were […]
Silence of the Sea (Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme 2026)
It’s crime, but is it art? Art forgers are a strange breed of criminals, in that the criticism they inspire is closer to the criticism I’m writing here than the moral denunciation given out to other outlaws. Most people aren’t ethically offended by someone turning out counterfeit Roman sculptures or […]
Experimental Shorts (Slamdance 2026)
An annual series of notes from underground, the Slamdance Film Festival’s experimental shorts strand is a reliably good weathervane of where the cutting edge of cinema is. Perhaps none of the directors assembled here will be the future of cinema in the sense of winning Oscars, being hired by Disney, […]
BRB (Slamdance 2026)
Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. When Bob Clark made A Christmas Story, he could afford to hinge whole subplots on the Little Orphan Annie radio show or leg-shaped novelty table lamps, safe in the knowledge that these items of retro kitsch had no further market value. Nobody was […]