After the debut film by their golden boy Orson Welles underperformed at the box office, RKO Studios decided to refocus their efforts on commercial genre work. They decided to create a new “horror unit” to make inexpensive frighteners and put Val Lewton, a former employee of legendary producer David O […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The Glass Key (1942) & The Veronica Lake Show (Review)
In his 1970 essay Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir, Raymond Durgnat suggests that the genre’s most common topics developed as a method of plausible deniability. As the Red Scare hotted up, left-leaning directors could address corruption in, say, prisons or boxing and have it stand as a microcosm […]
Fox and his Friends & Chinese Roulette (1975) The many faces of Fassbinder (Review)
Most nations experienced the 1970s as a long, paranoid hangover following the freedom and optimism of the 1960s. But pity poor Germany, which got all of the worst of the 1970s without a ’60s worth talking about. The signature political event of the 1960s in Germany was nothing to do […]
Stalker (1979) Tarkovsky’s Infamous & Unfettered Artistic Vision (Review)
Solaris got the remake, Andrei Rublev got the Vatican’s thumbs-up, and Mirror famously caused Lars von Trier to declare Andrei Tarkovsky was God. But the biggest cultural footprint of all the Russian director’s seven feature films undoubtedly belongs to Stalker. His adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic has inspired a […]
Sweet Bean (2015) Naomi Kawase as bolstered by infusions of documentary realism (Review)
DW Griffith once complained that the ‘modern’ Hollywood movie (he was speaking in 1947, though the trend has not reversed since) lacked “the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movements in a beautiful flowing of the blossoms”. He might have been impressed by Sweet Bean, the new film […]
The Shop on the High Street (1965) a perfume to mask the smell of death (Review)
Viewers for whom the former Czechoslovakia is, in the notorious words of Neville Chamberlain, “a faraway country of which we know little”, might be puzzled by one repeated image in Ján Kádar and Elmar Klos’s 1965 Oscar-winner The Shop on the High Street. It’s a huge pyramid erected by Nazi collaborators, […]
The In-Laws (1979) a pure-bred comedy unicorn (Review)
For all the wonders of the 1970s New Hollywood, it’s not rich in classic comedies. Newly reissued by the Criterion Collection, 1979’s The In-Laws remedies that, while also standing up well against the comedy subgenres and styles of the decades before and after. Its premise – a straight-laced dentist is dragged into […]
Burroughs: The Movie (1983) A Bizarre treat for fans of William S. Boroughs (Review)
Howard Brookner was a film student at NYU with Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo when he made a low-budget observational documentary about the most groundbreaking and original American writer of the 20th century, William S Burroughs. It should have been the start of a career to match his classmates, both […]
The Taviani Brothers Collection (1977-1984) Reality and Fiction Working Together (Review)
What does realism mean to you? Too often, it’s discussed as if it’s self-evident: a realistic film is one that resembles reality. To say that, though, is to unconsciously admit a number of blind spots. How do we judge something to be realistic? Is it really true, or just a […]
Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film (2016) Pulls off the Impossible (Review)
Silent Shakespeare? It might seem to invalidate the very reason why Shakespeare has been a cultural constant for centuries now, but it was popular in its time. When cinema was invented it was widely considered a novelty rather than a serious art form, so it was necessary to prove it could […]