There’s a certain sadness that comes from living in a place that’s meant to be driven through. Allison Anders’s Gas Food Lodging, reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow Academy, starts with Ione Skye and Fairuza Balk as sisters Trudi and Shade, sat in the New Mexico diner where their mother Nora works. […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Hitler’s Hollywood (2017) Modern History and it’s cinema’s darkest days (Review)
What do you think of when you think of Nazi-era German cinema? Leni Riefenstahl filling the screen with crowds cheering Hitler, or the explicitly anti-Semitic likes of Jud Süß and The Eternal Jew? Perhaps you think of Quentin Tarantino’s literal and figurative massacre of the industry in Inglourious Basterds, and […]
Eye of the Needle (1981) Rescue Under Fire (2017): Two War Reviews
The release of a book about Where Eagles Dare by no less a high-culture luminary than Geoff Dyer has us wondering: when did the war movie stop being a pillar of mainstream entertainment? The simple answer might be once the politics of war became divisive, but recent films like Lincoln […]
Myrkas of the World Unite: Is Doctor Who Posh? (Part 2)
The classic series of Doctor Who ended on a council estate, and the revived series began on one. It’s tempting to see the choice of location as a subtle reassurance that Doctor Who was picking up where it left off. The impression was strengthened when Rona Munro, the writer of […]
House of Salem (2016) a confidently staged British occult-kidnap thriller debut (Review)
Sometimes you have to remind yourself that British people were frightened by things before the 1970s. Whether they’re sociopolitical (VIP paedophile rings, tensions with the EU and the Irish border) or cultural (strange electronic music, unnerving children’s programming), all of our modern nightmares come from the Glam Decade. James Crow’s […]
Myrkas of the World Unite: Is Doctor Who Posh? (Part 1)
Once more, Doctor Who fans look forward to a historic event set to change everything about their favourite show. For the first time, the Doctor will have a Yorkshire accent. And also be female, but let’s focus on what matters. Joking aside, Jodie Whittaker’s decision to keep her just-outside-Huddersfield twang […]
Iceman (2018) Payback in the Palaeolithic (Review)
As a child of the ‘90s, it’s great to see the media icons of my youth returning to the spotlight. After comebacks from Jeff Goldblum and Janet Jackson, it’s Ötzi the Iceman’s turn. His hollow eyes and emaciated frame were inescapable in 1991, when his five-thousand-year-old corpse was found in […]
Separate Tables (1963) sophisticated fun save for some inadvertent unpleasantness
One of the main extras on the BFI’s new dual-format reissue of Separate Tables is an archive commentary by director Delbert Mann, who died in 2007. Mann is still probably best known for his Oscar-winning 1955 debut Marty, but he’d worked extensively in television beforehand. Back then the medium was […]
The Miraculous Virgin (1966) a virtuoso exercise of imagery & poetry (Review)
Štefan Uher’s The Miraculous Virgin, released on Blu-Ray for the first time anywhere in the world by Second Run Films, is one of those 1960s Czechoslovak films that’s so freeform in its plotting, so rapturously visual, that it’s hard to imagine it having a script, let alone a source novel. […]
Under the Tree (2017) Icelandic Black Comedy fails to live up to its early promise (Review)
Released in cinemas by Eureka Pictures, Hafsteinn Gunnar Sigurđsson’s Icelandic black comedy Under the Tree begins with an inspired contemporary take on an old joke. Atli, played by Steinthór Hróar Steinthórsson, is watching a sex tape of himself with his ex-girlfriend when his wife walks in. Panicked, he closes the […]