1974’s The Swinging Cheerleaders, reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow Home Video, has a script credited to Jane Witherspoon and Betty Conklin. In the same year, Conklin was also responsible for the screenplay for Act of Vengeance, a female revenge picture also released under the impeccably well-it-was-the-70s title Rape Squad. Witherspoon […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Joshua Oppenheimer: Early Work (1995-2003) It’s hard to imagine any limit to his imagination (Review)
For most filmgoers, Joshua Oppenheimer emerged fully-formed out of nowhere with his landmark 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. A horrifyingly intimate portrait of elderly death squad leaders in Indonesia, it fused fearless journalism with surreal, fantastical black comedy – a mix which earned the film the support of Werner […]
Ivan’s Childhood (1962) Once you’ve seen it, you won’t want to live in a world without it (Review)
Film history tends to invite less counterfactual speculation than military or political history, but here’s one for you: what if Ivan’s Childhood, now reissued by Curzon Artificial Eye, had never been made? Because that really did come close to happening. During production, source author Vladimir Bogomolov rejected a draft of […]
Richard III (1995) Ready to be reclaimed as a masterpiece (Review)
Ever since the Golden Age of Hollywood, Shakespeare adaptations have struggled to win a box-office take to match their prestige. The shining exception to the rule came during the 1990s, a period in which the Bard was so bankable that by the end of the decade Julie Taymor could get a green […]
The Club (2015) offers its characters nowhere to hide, no sunlight to enjoy, no corners to cower in (Review)
Whatever he did for his fourth film, Pablo Larraín must have known he needed to make a sharp turn. His first three films form such a comprehensive trilogy on life under Pinochet’s dictatorship that anything more would have risked tilling over old ground. His debut, Tony Manero, was a portrait of […]
Edvard Munch (1974) Peter Watkins fight to be free of genres, formats and cliches (Review)
As someone who works primarily in the documentary form, Peter Watkins probably doesn’t get asked where he gets his ideas. Not that there’s any need to – his 1974 epic Edvard Munch, released on Blu-Ray by Eureka Masters of Cinema, is the story of an intelligent man whose quest to […]
The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave (1971) & The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)(Review)
The Giallo, an influential style of Italian thriller originated during the 1960s, was not known for moral statements. That said, there’s a perfect summation of the sub-genres attitudes in one aside from 1972’s The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, the second of two films by Emilio Miraglia remastered and reissued […]
Expresso Bongo (1959) Cliff Richard in pre-swinging London Rock N’ Roll Musical (Review)
Let us imagine the pitch: a hotshot young writer and a director whose career spans groundbreaking horror, gritty drama and sexploitation decide to make a musical. But not just any musical – this would be a musical powered by stage performances, rather than the familiar contrivance of people bursting into […]
Beat Girl (1959) British B-Movie that found a 2nd life in 60s America (Review)
At the start of Ben Wilson’s 2007 history book Decency and Disorder, there are excerpts from letters written by French citizens who visited Britain and were horrified by the rudeness, salaciousness and drunkenness of life over here. That was in the early nineteenth century. One strict course of Victorian values later, […]
The Last Command (1928) The inaugural Best Actor Oscar Award Winner (Review)
By the time Josef von Sternberg made The Last Command in 1928, his lead actor had become such an institution in Germany that an entire genre was named after him. The Jannings-Film was used to describe any movie where Emil Jannings, the bearish icon of German silent cinema, played a […]