For a decade which produced some of the most enduring, beloved hits in American cinema history – everything from The Sound of Music to Psycho – it can be hard to love 1960s Hollywood in toto. The Golden Age was over, the 1970s New Hollywood was yet to be born, […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Rams (2020): not quite the GOAT, but a touching shaggy sheep story (Review)
Hollywood’s voracious consumption of other countries’ IP has made it easy to identify when a film has been Americanised, but what do we expect when a film transfers from Iceland to Australia? Grímur Hákonarson’s 2015 film Rams was voted the second-best Icelandic film of all time by the Icelandic website […]
A Rainy Day in New York (2019): and a grim day for Woody Allen fans (Review)
You might have missed it, but A Rainy Day in New York briefly became the first Woody Allen film to hit number one at the global box office. This is, admittedly, because it was May 2020 and nothing else was out – a strong showing in South Korea was enough […]
Liberté (2019) If you go down to the woods today… (Review)
There’s an image late on in Albert Serra’s Liberté which seems to contain something of the film in its entirety. A woman is walking through the woods, the scene of an orgy held by decadent aristocrats exiled from the court of France’s last king Louis XVI. She is in period […]
2020 Films You Might Have Missed…
The New World (three cuts, 2005-8): choose your own adventure (Review)
Terrence Malick is often caricatured as the Fotherington-Tomas of cinema, whose tendency to wander around saying hullo birds hullo trees hullo skies can appear ridiculous in modern-day films like Lawless [5]. If you want to see Malick’s style and thematic concerns in a world where they make absolute, perfect sense, […]
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves (1968/2005) red-hot takes (Review)
Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Two Takes by William Greaves is the new Blu-Ray release from Criterion UK. It contains genuine footage of the Roswell incident, cast-iron evidence of voter fraud, and natural health secrets that THEY don’t want you to know. None of the preceding sentence is true, but if I hadn’t come […]
Mouchette (1967) The kind of serious art cinema that just isn’t made anymore (Review)
It can be daunting watching a film with a Mouchette-sized reputation. Robert Bresson’s second adaptation of a novel by Georges Bernanos (after 1951’s Diary of a Country Priest) is one of the most acclaimed works from one of France’s most heavyweight directors; it’s been cited as a favourite by everyone […]
How You Live Your Story: Selected Works by Kevin Jerome Everson (2005-2020)(Review)
If I had to choose one film from Second Run’s new double-disc Blu-Ray of Kevin Jerome Everson’s work to sum up his appeal to the uninitiated, it would probably be the 2015 short Grand Finale. That’s not to say it’s the best thing on offer, merely that it offers the […]
Sweet Charity (1969): a musical for its time and ours (Review)
Put yourself in the mind of a moviegoer in 1969. At the time, it seemed like Hollywood was dying, struggling to compete with new, disruptive home-entertainment innovations. Even if they didn’t exist, though, the industry would be in trouble. Studios were ruinously focused on spectacle-driven tentpole films that were often […]