A rural, bawdy, political epic with magical realist fringes, full of drinking, singing and close-ups on weathered peasant faces, Vojtěch Jasný’s 1968 film All My Good Countrymen is exactly the sort of thing some people think of when you talk about classic European cinema. Following the fortunes and misfortunes of […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The Firemen’s Ball (1967) A good fun satire on totalitarianism? (Review)
If you’re intrigued by the current cinephile chatter about the Czechoslovak New Wave and you’re looking for a good place to start, you couldn’t do much better than Arrow’s new reissue of Miloš Forman’s second film. The Firemen’s Ball is as formally precise and tightly edited as any film in […]
Black Girl/Borom Sarret (1963) Say Hello to the Master of African Cinema (Review)
Black Girl and Borom Sarret, the two films by Ousmane Sembène included on this new BFI release, are historic films. That’s not a value judgement, that’s a statement of fact. A documentary-style account of a day in the life of a troubled wagon driver, Borom Sarret was the first short […]
Zardoz (1974) Much more than James Bond in a Red Nappy (Review)
There aren’t many measures by which Sean Connery’s career could be considered a failure, but he has his Achilles heels, chiefly his self-admitted failure to understand science fiction and fantasy. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a project which persuaded him after nearly half a century of success that this acting […]
3 Women (1977) Stealthing its way into Altman’s canon of classics (Review)
We all know how Robert Altman spent the 1970s, right? M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs Miller. Freewheeling satirical ensemble pieces, playing fast and loose with genre, inventing the adjective Altmanesque for their naturalistic sprawl. Except there’s another face of Altman’s ’70s work. He was so prolific that […]
Hard to be a God (2015) A difficult, dirty, violent epic of a swansong (Review)
The world feels like a brutal, unsentimental place after watching Aleksei German’s final film, not least when I had the following realisation: Hard to be a God’s ceaseless, grotesque phantasmagoria of cruelty makes German the only director who could possibly adapt Cormac McCarthy’s classic novel Blood Meridian. But now he’s […]
Horse Money (2014) Difficult, obtuse, but an open mind will see you through (Review)
After a decade of bringing undervalued and overlooked films to light on DVD, Second Run’s career as a big-screen distributor begins, in a winningly perverse fashion, with an elegy. Pedro Costa’s Horse Money adds the fourth instalment to what most people assumed would be a trilogy of films set in […]
Dragon’s Return (1968) A Jaw-Dropping Masterpiece of the Slovak Style (Review)
All generalisations are false, up to and including this one. But it does feel as if, even before Czechoslovakia divided into two nations, there were already two parallel cinemas existing in it. You have the Czech films of Jan Švankmajer and Věra Chytilová; witty, urban, fast-cut, colourful, likely to appeal […]
How to be Eccentric: The Essential Richard Massingham
So who is Richard Massingham, and why is the BFI declaring his work “essential”? Viewers of some of the BFI’s earlier collections of public information and documentary films will be familiar with a few of the films collected here – 30 Miles An Hour appears on the road safety collection […]
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Newly Minted as the Greatest Documentary Ever Made (Review)
Newly enthroned by Sight & Sound as the greatest documentary ever made, Man With a Movie Camera is an easy film to enjoy. Partly this is because of its ripping pace – 67 minutes long, utterly relentless and married here with a Michael Nyman score which matches it gallop for […]