Viewers for whom the former Czechoslovakia is, in the notorious words of Neville Chamberlain, “a faraway country of which we know little”, might be puzzled by one repeated image in Ján Kádar and Elmar Klos’s 1965 Oscar-winner The Shop on the High Street. It’s a huge pyramid erected by Nazi collaborators, […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The In-Laws (1979) a pure-bred comedy unicorn (Review)
For all the wonders of the 1970s New Hollywood, it’s not rich in classic comedies. Newly reissued by the Criterion Collection, 1979’s The In-Laws remedies that, while also standing up well against the comedy subgenres and styles of the decades before and after. Its premise – a straight-laced dentist is dragged into […]
Burroughs: The Movie (1983) A Bizarre treat for fans of William S. Boroughs (Review)
Howard Brookner was a film student at NYU with Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo when he made a low-budget observational documentary about the most groundbreaking and original American writer of the 20th century, William S Burroughs. It should have been the start of a career to match his classmates, both […]
The Taviani Brothers Collection (1977-1984) Reality and Fiction Working Together (Review)
What does realism mean to you? Too often, it’s discussed as if it’s self-evident: a realistic film is one that resembles reality. To say that, though, is to unconsciously admit a number of blind spots. How do we judge something to be realistic? Is it really true, or just a […]
Play On! Shakespeare in Silent Film (2016) Pulls off the Impossible (Review)
Silent Shakespeare? It might seem to invalidate the very reason why Shakespeare has been a cultural constant for centuries now, but it was popular in its time. When cinema was invented it was widely considered a novelty rather than a serious art form, so it was necessary to prove it could […]
The Swinging Cheerleaders (1974) Jack Hill’s sleazy entrée into the high school comedy (Review)
1974’s The Swinging Cheerleaders, reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow Home Video, has a script credited to Jane Witherspoon and Betty Conklin. In the same year, Conklin was also responsible for the screenplay for Act of Vengeance, a female revenge picture also released under the impeccably well-it-was-the-70s title Rape Squad. Witherspoon […]
Joshua Oppenheimer: Early Work (1995-2003) It’s hard to imagine any limit to his imagination (Review)
For most filmgoers, Joshua Oppenheimer emerged fully-formed out of nowhere with his landmark 2012 documentary The Act of Killing. A horrifyingly intimate portrait of elderly death squad leaders in Indonesia, it fused fearless journalism with surreal, fantastical black comedy – a mix which earned the film the support of Werner […]
Ivan’s Childhood (1962) Once you’ve seen it, you won’t want to live in a world without it (Review)
Film history tends to invite less counterfactual speculation than military or political history, but here’s one for you: what if Ivan’s Childhood, now reissued by Curzon Artificial Eye, had never been made? Because that really did come close to happening. During production, source author Vladimir Bogomolov rejected a draft of […]
Richard III (1995) Ready to be reclaimed as a masterpiece (Review)
Ever since the Golden Age of Hollywood, Shakespeare adaptations have struggled to win a box-office take to match their prestige. The shining exception to the rule came during the 1990s, a period in which the Bard was so bankable that by the end of the decade Julie Taymor could get a green […]
The Club (2015) offers its characters nowhere to hide, no sunlight to enjoy, no corners to cower in (Review)
Whatever he did for his fourth film, Pablo Larraín must have known he needed to make a sharp turn. His first three films form such a comprehensive trilogy on life under Pinochet’s dictatorship that anything more would have risked tilling over old ground. His debut, Tony Manero, was a portrait of […]