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 […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
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 […]
F for Fake (1973) Orson Welles’s beguiling, adventurous art documentary swansong (Review)
“I started at the top”, Orson Welles quips in F for Fake, “and have been working my way down ever since”. After the great man’s death in 1985 Welles’s gag became something worryingly close to consensus. Obituary after obituary tutted about what a shame it was that he never lived up […]
Samuel Fuller at Columbia (1937-61)(Review)
There are two schools of thought on what makes a good box set. The first is what you might call the blockbuster principle: just assemble as impressive a collection of hits as you can. Certainly, that works – there’s a reason there are so many anthologies of Hitchcock and Coen […]
Black Peter (1964) The origins of Czech New Wave’s greatest export (Review)
Visiting the local co-op to see his sixteen-year-old son at work, a father barks angrily “That’s not working! That’s just standing and looking!” But there’s a value to standing and looking when you’re employed – as the boy, Petr, is – as a trainee store detective. Miloš Forman’s Black Peter, […]