Louis Malle’s advice for directors trying to make films overseas was to start with a genre piece; he’d began his American career with the tough social drama Pretty Baby, and he later wondered if he should have instead done something in a less realist register, where people would forgive the […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
A Face in the Crowd: The American nightmare, years ahead of its time (Review)
An American television institution from the days before American sitcoms was the backbone of Channel Four, most Britons will be familiar with The Andy Griffith Show through its cultural after-effects, rather than the show itself. This writer first heard of it via the distorting mirror of ‘Floyd the Barber’, the […]
Breaking the Limits: Punkish Polish biopic (Review)
Those paying attention to the British box office top ten will have noticed something unexpected creeping in over the last few years, a hardy microflora springing up in between the usual mix of franchises by Disney and franchises by studios bought out by Disney. For the first time since the […]
The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot: 21st-century tall tales (Review)
Normally when a film’s auteur identity is ascribed to a producer it’s because said producer is a major Hollywood player. We know what a Jerry Bruckheimer film looks like, as surely as previous generations knew what a David O Selznick film looks like. In the independent realm, the director is […]
Everybody in Our Family: Atmospheric, touching and defiantly small-scale (Review)
Previously, the only film by the Romanian director Radu Jude to receive a general release in the UK is Aferim!, an eccentric, stylized take on Western genre tropes that slowly reveals itself to be a commentary on a historical atrocity little-known outside Eastern Europe. Now, Second Run have released his […]
Anna and the Apocalypse: equal parts toe-tapping and head-smashing (Review)
For many unsuspecting viewers, the first shock in Anna and the Apocalypse will come before a single zombie has turned up: five minutes in, the characters start singing. Despite horror arguably having a stronger relationship with original music than any other genre – go ahead, imagine Halloween or Suspiria without […]
The Song of Bernadette: a film of faith, but not blind faith (Review)
There’s a common lament among certain American Christian bloggers that Hollywood doesn’t make movies with spiritual content like it used to, which to this writer’s eyes does a disservice to interesting modern films about Christianity – The Tree of Life, Silence, First Reformed et al – and also glosses over […]
To Sleep With Anger: the eternally youthful Charles Burnett (Review)
The 2003 Martin Scorsese-produced HBO anthology series The Blues featured a lot of big-name directors offering their take on America’s centrally important musical genre. Yet most critics agreed that the best episode wasn’t directed by Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders or Scorsese himself. It was the episode Warming by the Devil’s […]
Kolobos (1999) soft satire, but hard gore (Review)
Let’s spin back to summer, 1999; Big Brother launches in the Netherlands, the public is slowly becoming acclimatised to words like “webcam” and “JPEG”, and the two big horror talking points – Ringu and The Blair Witch Project – take the genre’s regular voyeuristic concerns into an age where VHS […]
The Boys In The Band (1970) After Stonewall, Before Pride (Review)
He may be associated with the tough, transgressive American cinema of the 1970s, but there’s a part of William Friedkin that would have made a first-rate Old Hollywood journeyman. Peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader have recently been making personal, self-penned projects, but Friedkin’s 21st-century career renaissance came […]