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, […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
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 […]
Couple in a Hole (2015) Satisfying small drama from debuting Belgian Director (Review)
Tom Geens’s Couple in a Hole begins with a gorgeous, slow shot of a forest at the height of summer, then it delivers its first jolt before the film is two minutes old. Geens’s second film after 2009’s Menteur, Couple in a Hole is his first work outside his native Belgium, […]
The Sound Barrier (1952) David Lean, The Showman with Substance? (Review)
Despite being a hit on its 1952 release, The Sound Barrier is now one of the least-seen of David Lean’s films. A shame, as it represents an artist in the middle of a fascinating transition. Released just five years before The Bridge on the River Kwai, its daring spectacle points […]
Ken Russell: The Great Passions (1965-7)(Review)
How many BBC arts documentaries of the 1960s do you think begin with the exhumation of a mummified corpse, lit by flickering torches and soundtracked by booming horror-movie music? Not many, I’ll wager, but then there weren’t many directors walking the corridors of Broadcasting House who resembled Ken Russell. For […]