As someone who works primarily in the documentary form, Peter Watkins probably doesn’t get asked where he gets his ideas. Not that there’s any need to – his 1974 epic Edvard Munch, released on Blu-Ray by Eureka Masters of Cinema, is the story of an intelligent man whose quest to […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The Night Evelyn Came out of the Grave (1971) & The Red Queen Kills Seven Times (1972)(Review)
The Giallo, an influential style of Italian thriller originated during the 1960s, was not known for moral statements. That said, there’s a perfect summation of the sub-genres attitudes in one aside from 1972’s The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, the second of two films by Emilio Miraglia remastered and reissued […]
Expresso Bongo (1959) Cliff Richard in pre-swinging London Rock N’ Roll Musical (Review)
Let us imagine the pitch: a hotshot young writer and a director whose career spans groundbreaking horror, gritty drama and sexploitation decide to make a musical. But not just any musical – this would be a musical powered by stage performances, rather than the familiar contrivance of people bursting into […]
Beat Girl (1959) British B-Movie that found a 2nd life in 60s America (Review)
At the start of Ben Wilson’s 2007 history book Decency and Disorder, there are excerpts from letters written by French citizens who visited Britain and were horrified by the rudeness, salaciousness and drunkenness of life over here. That was in the early nineteenth century. One strict course of Victorian values later, […]
The Last Command (1928) The inaugural Best Actor Oscar Award Winner (Review)
By the time Josef von Sternberg made The Last Command in 1928, his lead actor had become such an institution in Germany that an entire genre was named after him. The Jannings-Film was used to describe any movie where Emil Jannings, the bearish icon of German silent cinema, played a […]
Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) Home to one of the greatest battle scenes of all time (Review)
Shakespeare’s stories, character and language might be what reel us in, but it’s the mysteries that can engender an obsession. From Sigmund Freud, who famously pored over a psychiatric diagnosis of Prince Hamlet, to John Sutherland and Cedric Watts, who published an entire book (Henry V, War Criminal?) on the […]
Mysterious Object at Noon (2000) the most groundbreaking and innovative director of the 21st century (Review)
The first film by Apichatpong Weerasethakul begins with a shot that approximates the feeling of tuning an analogue radio; mysterious, haunting, archaic and likely to land you somewhere you weren’t expecting. It’s a black-and-white tracking shot through the front window of a moving vehicle, with an overlapping sound mix that […]
Grey Gardens (1975) The Maysles Brothers Forgotten Masterpiece resurfaces (Review)
What are the building blocks of a cult movie? Uniqueness and a certain quotability both help, but also it needs the sense of a world to explore, an impression that every casual reference to an off-screen character or brief appearance might lead to a life as full as any of […]
Back to God’s Country (1953) Refreshingly Straight-Forward Artic Western (Review)
A Technicolor frontier adventure set in the wilds of the Arctic, Back to God’s Country exists at the intersection of three of the most comfortingly dad-movie genres; the pre-revisionist Western, the wilderness survival story and the Jack London-patented faithful dog story. Source author James Oliver Curwood was a contemporary of […]
Bad Sister (1931) A Minor film with a Major claim to Fame (Review)
A minor film with a major claim to fame, Hobart Henley’s The Bad Sister was intended as a vehicle for Conrad Nagel and Sidney Fox, the latter of whom plays the disreputable sibling of the title. Today its fame rests on two supporting cast members; Humphrey Bogart in a supporting […]