Anybody wondering whether Stella Cadente is a traditional royal costume drama will have their questions answered about twenty-six minutes in, when the King’s assistant goes out to the woods to have sex with a melon while an aria from Madame Butterfly plays. As confident in its own eccentricities as you’d […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Looking for Richard (1996) Al Pacino of the creative process and Shakespeare (Review)
“It has always been a dream of mine to communicate how I feel about Shakespeare to other people”, Al Pacino says early on in Looking for Richard. Most actors probably feel the same way, and they communicate it through acting. Pacino wanted to do something bigger. Stepping behind the camera, he […]
Christine (1983) The “Ugly-Duckling” of Carpenter’s 80s run gets the respect it deserves (Review)
As culture becomes more fixated on nostalgia, we’re going to have to spend a lot of time reassessing what happened two or three decades ago. At the moment that means the Eighties, with everything from Stranger Things to Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles drawing from The Me Decade. Comparing nostalgia for the eighties to […]
The Hills Have Eyes (1977) The Evolution of Wes Craven, the rule-breaker (Review)
At the beginning and the end of 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes – now reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow home video – clouds of dust blow through the desert-like an all-American version of Hammer’s oppressive fog. It’s an early sign that writer-director Wes Craven is more concerned with atmosphere and […]
Paris Blues (1962) Comes to Life with the Jazz and the Style (Review)
Here’s a less-than-fun fact; when Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues was released in 1961, the opening flirtation between Paul Newman and Diahann Carroll would have been a crime in 22 American states. Released on Blu-Ray fifty-five years later as part of the British Film Institute’s Black Star season, it is noticeable […]
Cosmos (2015) Żuławski ransacks his knowledge of art and pop culture for the most surreal swansong (Review)
It’s a strange world, but has it ever looked stranger than it does through the eyes of Witold Gombrowicz and Andrzej Żuławski? Żuławski was the late Polish director whose film Possession became quite the artiest thing on the Department of Public Prosecutions’ infamous ‘video nasties’ list. Gombrowicz was one of a generation of European authors who […]
One Million Years BC (1966) Harryhausen, Dinosaurs and the legendary bikini (Review)
If you’re a man of a certain age who remembers getting strange feelings when their parents let them watch the dinosaur movie on TV, then you already know whether or not you should buy StudioCanal’s Blu-Ray of One Million Years B.C. Don Chaffey’s film has an iconic stature for a […]
The Sacrifice (1986) Tarkovsky’s Acutely Intelligent Swansong (Review)
Released just six months before his death from cancer, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is commonly held to be an uncomfortably elegiac, melancholy note for the great director to bow out on, which considering the rest of his films were hardly Duck Soup is saying something. In tackling the central threat […]
Carmen Jones (1954) Influential Black Musical with a weird relationship to race (Review)
Your reviewer can sometimes be guilty of dancing around the less quantifiable aspects of enjoying a movie, so let’s talk about star presence. As soon as she appears on screen in Otto Preminger’s 1950 musical – reissued for the first time on Blu-Ray by the BFI – Dorothy Dandridge has […]
Tartuffe (1925) Dynamic, daring and full of beautiful compositions, it’s definitely more than lesser Murnau (Review)
In Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film The Silence of the Sea, Howard Vernon’s tragically naive Nazi lieutenant tries to curry favour with the French family he’s staying with by praising their culture. He says his Fatherland has but one emblematic literary genius, Goethe, but France is spoiled for choice with Zola, […]