She’s got armfuls of good reviews and her films have opened at Cannes, but it still feels like people don’t recognise how good Clio Barnard is. Among her peers, Andrea Arnold is the heir apparent of social realist cinema, Ben Wheatley has the genre fans in his corner and Peter […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Jubilee (1978) Pure Punk and Pure Derek Jarman (Review)
And so time marches on, stopping only to produce ironies. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, its very title a sarcastic reference to Queen Elizabeth II’s twenty-five years in office, is reissued by the BFI on dual format for its own ruby anniversary. The disc is released a week or so after the […]
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) The Antidote to Biopic Fatigue (Review)
An extraordinary film even by the standards of Criterion’s UK catalogue, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is your go-to film to counter accusations that biopics are inherently stuffy, stylistically conservative Oscar-bait. And it’s all thanks to Hank Williams. After surviving the excesses of the ’70s New Hollywood, […]
Allure (2017) A modern equivalent to ’90s psychological thrillers like Single White Female (Review)
It’s way, way down the list of the important consequences of #MeToo, but the fact that so many actresses are now also prominent activists is having a subtle effect on the way we interpret film authorship. In the traditional auteurist sense, Allure is un film de Carlos and Jason Sanchez, […]
Metropolitan (1990) Whit Stillman’s Comedy of High Society Manners (Review)
It’s always a risk for a film to give you too many pointers about how to read it; most people like to work that out for themselves. But I was very charmed by a moment about halfway into Whit Stillman’s 1990 debut Metropolitan – reissued on Region 2 Blu-Ray by […]
Early Hou Hsiao-hsien: Three Films 1980-1983 (Review)
“Success is elusive. Something lost is difficult to find. Progress takes time.” That quote comes from the last film on Eureka Masters of Cinema’s new Blu-Ray collection of early Hou Hsaio-Hsien films, 1983’s The Boys From Fengkuei. After watching all three films in the set, it’s hard not to interpret […]
La Chinoise (1967) More fun than the dry, doctrinaire Godard it is accused of being (Review)
There’s no greater feeling of kinship than learning someone shares your hot take, so let’s start this review of Arrow Academy’s Blu-Ray of La Chinoise by praising one of the extras – a great, informative, witty discussion of the film by Denitza Bantcheva. Listening to Bantcheva, I finally felt like […]
Twin Peaks The Return Episode 18 (The Rewatch)
Twin Peaks the Return Episode 18 MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS WHAT IS YOUR NAME? LA-based viewers of the Twin Peaks finale felt unsettled when Dale Cooper drove up to Eat At Judy’s. This isn’t an unusual feeling when watching Twin Peaks: rewatching this episode, I felt deeply uncomfortable waiting for the […]
Twin Peaks The Return Episode 17 (The Rewatch)
Twin Peaks the Return Episode 17 MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS THE PAST DICTATES THE FUTURE David Lynch once admitted to being “fascinated” by the spread of grey hair on his head. As responses to the ageing process go, it’s not one that’s widely shared. Yet you can see its benefits all over […]
Sleeping Dogs (1977) a dystopia so stark it makes Mad Max look like Mad Max: Fury Road (Review)
The first time my uncle heard of a club putting on a 1970s nostalgia night, he was stunned. He’d lived through the decade and had no plans to revisit it. If they want a true taste of Britain in the ’70s, he said, someone should go and cut the power […]