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 […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
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 […]
The Beast (1975) Boro’s eye-wateringly animalistic Beauty & the Beast (Review)
Before we turn our attention to the last disc of Arrow’s Blu-Ray Borowczyk restorations, let us take stock of the man’s career up to this point. A shoestring genius of experimental animation, “Boro” had proved his versatility with four massively different features; the crackpot animated comedy of Theatre of Mr. […]
Immoral Tales (1973) Art, History and Sex Cinema in the hands of Borowczyk (Review)
Since one of the stated aims of Arrow’s Walerian Borowczyk collection has been to rescue his reputation from an association with pornography, it seems strange to say that including two of the late-period erotic films is a masterstroke. And yet it is. Viewed in context, Immoral Tales and its supporting […]
War and Peace (2002) monumental War Documentary more committed to peace than bloodshed (Review)
War When Mark Cousins started his monthly column in Sight & Sound magazine in 2012, a large chunk of his inaugural piece was spent discussing the work of Anand Patwardhan. Patwardhan is one of those documentarians who the international film festival cognoscenti know and love, yet is almost completely unheard-of […]
Blanche (1971) More Jacobean Tragedy than Euro-Kink Nightmare (Review)
The third film in Arrow’s acclaimed series of Walerian Borowczyk restorations, Blanche is an entry into the late 1960s and early 1970s cycle of Medieval films that produced notable work by Jacques Demy and Pier Paolo Pasolini, before Borowczyk’s disciple Terry Gilliam helped to lovingly spoof it to death with […]