Before we get into Second Run’s new release of Věra Chytilová’s debut film and the short that preceded it, let’s take a second to acknowledge that all of Chytilová’s 1960s work (barring her contribution to the 1965 anthology film Pearls of the Deep) is now available on British DVD. This […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Fixed Bayonets! (1951) Gleefully old-fashioned Korean War pulp poetry (Review)
Before he was a director, Samuel Fuller fought in World War II and worked as a tabloid journalist. The former experience shaped his politics, the latter shaped his sensibility. If Fuller’s films sometimes seem simplistic, their simplicity is at least born of sincerity. He knows what he believes, and he […]
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) Rarely been bettered in the 57 years since (Review)
Forgive the sentimentality, but one of your correspondent’s all-time idols has just died unexpectedly (you know who it is- it’s not Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart) and it is hard to review a film about loss, pain and memory without wondering about all these obituaries, and who they are for. Perhaps a […]
Aferim! (2015) Django Unchained being played over images from Meek’s Cutoff (Review)
Since Cristi Puiu’s 2005 breakthrough The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Western European audiences have grown accustomed to seeing a certain kind of film come out of Romania. They came to be known as the Romanian New Wave, and even the most dedicated sceptic of national film movements would have to […]
By Our Selves (2015) An Andrew Kötting Appreciation
It is a bright, sunny day some time in 2014, and Eden Kötting is alive. She is drawing on a transparent sheet with a big black felt tip, and explaining how powerful people are all fools. This simple set-up is the basis for This Illuminated World is Full of Stupid […]
All My Good Countrymen (1968) Even a dictatorship can’t keep a lid on this (Review)
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 […]
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 […]