Some directors are primarily famous for one scene, and in the case of Kazuo Hara it’s easy to pinpoint which one it is. Hara’s 1987 documentary The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is notorious for a moment in which the film’s subject Kenzo Okuzaki, a Japanese World War II veteran […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
New Directors from Japan: Takashi Ono (2016-2023)
Every now and then you see a film where the only viable response is: where did that come from? The beauty of Third Window’s new Takashi Ono collection is that it answers that question. As collections go, it’s modestly-scaled stuff; three shorts and a feature, and the feature’s only just […]
Doctor Who A-Z #115: Logopolis (1981)
Like so many generations of fans, my road into Doctor Who fandom was paved with Target novelisations. During the 1990s there were almost no repeats on terrestrial TV, the videos were often expensive or hard to obtain, and the idea of the whole “Whoniverse” on iPlayer was a madman’s dream. Those little […]
Doctor Who A-Z #114: The Keeper of Traken (1981)
One curiosity of the Tom Baker years is its reluctance to use old villains. After the understandable caution of his first, continuity-packed season, the show settles into a groove of one previously established threat per season – sometimes, in Season Thirteen and Season Sixteen, even fewer than that. This sparing […]
Doctor Who A-Z #113: Warriors’ Gate (1981)
I’ve tended to interpret Doctor Who stories through an authorial lens during this project, which raises the question of how we decide authorship in television. The cliche is that it’s a writer’s medium, and Doctor Who‘s format – the ultimate procedural, where every week involves a different location, set-up and […]
Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960): most super of the Polish “super productions”
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 […]
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 […]