It’s a strange world, but has it ever looked stranger than it does through the eyes of Witold Gombrowicz and Andrzej Żuławski? Żuławski was the late Polish director whose film Possession became quite the artiest thing on the Department of Public Prosecutions’ infamous ‘video nasties’ list. Gombrowicz was one of a generation of European authors who […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
One Million Years BC (1966) Harryhausen, Dinosaurs and the legendary bikini (Review)
If you’re a man of a certain age who remembers getting strange feelings when their parents let them watch the dinosaur movie on TV, then you already know whether or not you should buy StudioCanal’s Blu-Ray of One Million Years B.C. Don Chaffey’s film has an iconic stature for a […]
The Sacrifice (1986) Tarkovsky’s Acutely Intelligent Swansong (Review)
Released just six months before his death from cancer, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is commonly held to be an uncomfortably elegiac, melancholy note for the great director to bow out on, which considering the rest of his films were hardly Duck Soup is saying something. In tackling the central threat […]
Carmen Jones (1954) Influential Black Musical with a weird relationship to race (Review)
Your reviewer can sometimes be guilty of dancing around the less quantifiable aspects of enjoying a movie, so let’s talk about star presence. As soon as she appears on screen in Otto Preminger’s 1950 musical – reissued for the first time on Blu-Ray by the BFI – Dorothy Dandridge has […]
Tartuffe (1925) Dynamic, daring and full of beautiful compositions, it’s definitely more than lesser Murnau (Review)
In Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film The Silence of the Sea, Howard Vernon’s tragically naive Nazi lieutenant tries to curry favour with the French family he’s staying with by praising their culture. He says his Fatherland has but one emblematic literary genius, Goethe, but France is spoiled for choice with Zola, […]
Cat People (1942) one of the most singular, groundbreaking horror movies in American history (Review)
After the debut film by their golden boy Orson Welles underperformed at the box office, RKO Studios decided to refocus their efforts on commercial genre work. They decided to create a new “horror unit” to make inexpensive frighteners and put Val Lewton, a former employee of legendary producer David O […]
The Glass Key (1942) & The Veronica Lake Show (Review)
In his 1970 essay Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir, Raymond Durgnat suggests that the genre’s most common topics developed as a method of plausible deniability. As the Red Scare hotted up, left-leaning directors could address corruption in, say, prisons or boxing and have it stand as a microcosm […]
Fox and his Friends & Chinese Roulette (1975) The many faces of Fassbinder (Review)
Most nations experienced the 1970s as a long, paranoid hangover following the freedom and optimism of the 1960s. But pity poor Germany, which got all of the worst of the 1970s without a ’60s worth talking about. The signature political event of the 1960s in Germany was nothing to do […]
Stalker (1979) Tarkovsky’s Infamous & Unfettered Artistic Vision (Review)
Solaris got the remake, Andrei Rublev got the Vatican’s thumbs-up, and Mirror famously caused Lars von Trier to declare Andrei Tarkovsky was God. But the biggest cultural footprint of all the Russian director’s seven feature films undoubtedly belongs to Stalker. His adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic has inspired a […]
Sweet Bean (2015) Naomi Kawase as bolstered by infusions of documentary realism (Review)
DW Griffith once complained that the ‘modern’ Hollywood movie (he was speaking in 1947, though the trend has not reversed since) lacked “the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movements in a beautiful flowing of the blossoms”. He might have been impressed by Sweet Bean, the new film […]