On the face of it, we shouldn’t need to watch blaxploitation any more. As soon as Will Smith and Denzel Washington became viable Hollywood action movie stars, its USP of showing black actors in empowered, heroic roles was co-opted. This, though, ignores the pleasures of blaxploitation as a movie-making style; […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Shooting Stars (1928) Unapologetically British Silent Film Glamour (Review)
It’s not often that I’m prescriptive about the way you choose to watch a film, but if you do get the BFI’s new dual-format edition of Anthony Asquith and A.V. Bramble’s pioneering British silent Shooting Stars, watch the extras first. The main bonus feature is a near-fifty minute compilation of […]
Something Different / A Bagful of Fleas (1962-3) breezy, charming and fiercely political (Review)
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 […]
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 […]