As my colleague Rob Simpson keeps having to point out, a film doesn’t need likeable characters to be good. It doesn’t even need smart characters. There’s a whole subgenre of noir fiction from Jim Thompson through to the Coen brothers which takes knuckle-dragging characters doing repellent things and alchemises them into […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Texas Adios (1966) A glimpse of the Spaghetti Westerns yet to come (Review)
Say one thing for Texas Adios, the 1966 spaghetti Western reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow Video; it doesn’t hang around. A friend of mine likes to needle me by describing Westerns as a genre where you spend eighty minutes waiting for one action scene, but Texas Adios’s first action scene […]
The Early Films of Olivier Assayas (1986 & 1989)(Review)
In 2007 Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni died on the same day, prompting a lot of critics to wonder who would take their place in culture. For a while I wondered this as well; who would make work like Persona or The Passenger for our era, creating new stories and […]
The Tree of Life (2011) A film we’ll never stop talking about (Review)
In scale alone it’s the extra of the year: Criterion UK’s new release of Terrence Malick’s 2011 Palme d’Or winner The Tree of Life comes with a bonus disc featuring a completely new cut of the film. From start to finish, Malick was the driving force behind the re-edit – […]
Project A (1983) & Project A II (1987) Jackie Chan, the Cinephile (Review)
One of the pleasures of watching Eureka’s ongoing series of Jackie Chan Blu-Rays is the case history they offer in the construction of a superstar persona. Early on in his career Jackie Chan was billed as the heir apparent to Bruce Lee, and inasmuch as he completed the process Lee […]
Gas Food Lodging (1992) a quintessential 2018 indie movie made in 1992 (Review)
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. […]
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 […]