Even before his death in July 2018, Claude Lanzmann was always easier to imagine in retrospect. He remained a public figure into his nineties, and a valuable one at that: thoughtful, eloquent, combative when necessary. His work, though, was dominated by two time periods. The first was the period from […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Opera (1987) Argento Is No Ordinary Horror Director And [This] No Ordinary Horror Film (Review)
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Cult Films have quickly made a name for themselves in the home release market as Italian cinema specialists – but very much at the Fellini/De Sica end of that country’s output, which on the surface makes them a strange choice to reissue Dario Argento’s brutal horror Opera on Blu-Ray. Those […]
Josie (2018): … To Be Bad You Have To Recognise That You’re Bad (Review)
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 […]
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 […]