The Czech director Věra Chytilová is best known internationally for her 1966 film Daisies, a ferocious, antic and relentlessly original comedy about two young women carrying out a Dadaist rebellion against the staidness of Czechoslovakian society. Although Daisies seems to become more and more acclaimed as a classic with each […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Pictures of the Old World (1972) Sorrowful, Funny and Bawdy portrait of a people (Review)
When Czechoslovakia divided into two nations in 1993, cinema fans could be forgiven for thinking the new Czech Republic had hoarded the family silver. So many of the former nation’s finest directors – Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Jan Švankmajer – were Czech, so there’s a thrill of discovery […]
The Turning (2015) Eclectic Aussie Shorts based on the work of Tim Winton (Review)
It’s a common lament among booksellers that you just can’t get people interested in short story collections, which is a shame considering writers as diverse as HP Lovecraft, E Annie Proulx, Angela Carter, Eileen Chang and Jorge Luis Borges have produced their finest works in this form. So it’s to […]
The Last of the Unjust (2013): Shoah director still throws up genuine moral challenges (Review)
Claude Lanzmann’s complex, heavyweight and incredibly powerful new film The Last of the Unjust is a feature-length reworking of material gathered over the arduous twelve-year shoot for his defining work Shoah. It is an interview with Benjamin Murmelstein, a Viennese rabbi appointed by the Nazis as “Elder” of Theresienstadt, the […]
Kinetta (2005) Yorgos Lanthimos before he started weirding the world out (Review)
Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have the feel – though not the visual style – of watching CCTV footage of a rowdy Saturday night. You are always aware that terrible violence could erupt at any moment, but you don’t know when, and it’s all you can do to watch in a state […]
Little Lost Robot (Out of this World)
Before production started on Doctor Who in 1963, the BBC commissioned an internal document assessing the difficulties of producing a science-fiction series. In particular, they were concerned that female viewers would be uninterested in such a show. Perhaps one reason why the show’s creator Sydney Newman pressed on was that […]