The first thing we hear is the distant barking of dogs, and the wolves have certainly been out for Chris Pine’s directorial debut since it premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Before the event began, the idea of Best Chris giving his variant on the Dude archetype in […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
The G (2023): lean, realist revenge thriller puts a welcome spotlight on Dale Dickey (Review)
The concept of “geriaction” has been around for a fair while, although not long enough for people to give it a better name. Younger audiences born around the time Liam Neeson made his first Taken movie in 2008 might be forgiven for assuming older leads are just a thing action […]
The Crazy Family (1984) Energetic Bad-Taste Comedy Breaks down the Traditional Japanese Family Drama (Review)
The first thing you wonder when you sit down to watch a film called The Crazy Family – now released on Blu-Ray by Third Window – is how crazy are they going to be, exactly? “Crazy”, as a descriptor, can be pretty relatable: we were definitely meant to feel for Beyonce when […]
Trenque Lauquen (2022) There’s Something Big Happening in Argentina (Review)
There’s something big happening in Argentina – operative word big. El Pampero Cine is a collective who have made an international name for themselves making movies that are experimental, local and personal, yet which shun the modest scale of most films which can be so described. Their most ambitious production […]
Hamlet (2024): Age cannot wither McKellen’s Great Dane (Review)
To quote that great authority on Shakespearian acting, Withnail’s Uncle Monty, “it is the most devastating moment in a young man’s life when he quite reasonably says to himself ‘I shall never play the Dane!’” Shakespeare might have ascribed seven ages to man in As You Like It, but as […]
Three films by Jerzy Skolimowski: Walkover, Barrier and Dialogue 20-40-60 (1965-68) (Blu-Ray Review)
Jerzy Skolimowski’s film Barrier, the second in this Blu-Ray set of three early features from Second Run, begins with a manifesto. A youthful man is complaining that the young are always expected to make sacrifices while the old simply accumulate wealth, and questions why it can’t be him in the […]
Happy End (1967): the kind of film that could spark a lifelong obsession with Czech comedy (Review)
A quote from Søren Kierkegaard – don’t worry, this gets funny soon – kept coming to mind as I watched Oldřich Lipský’s Happy End, now released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Second Run. The Danish philosopher said “It is really true what philosophy tells us, that life must […]
Danger Zone (Kinoteka 2024) (Review)
It’s the kind of sentiment you expect to hear on stage at the Kodak Theater around this time of year: “It’s important to learn from the suffering of other people”. Except this time it’s not coming from the mouth of someone who’s just made an Oscar-winning film, it’s said by […]
One Percenter (2023): Japanese Fall Guy delivers eighty-five minutes of mayhem (Review)
For some people, films about film-making are insufferable exercises in navel-gazing, nothing more than a way for self-absorbed artistes to force us to experience their creative angst. Yet there is a long history of this kind of meta-film within that least pretentious of genres, action. There’s a pretty simple reason […]
A Wolfpack Called Ernesto (2023): Experimental look at Mexican Gang Culture (Review)
As one of the subjects of Everardo Gonzáles’s new film A Wolfpack Called Ernesto puts it, “you get involved by looking”. Where theatre has monologues and novels have first-person narration, film has the close-up as its signature method of encouraging you to identify with a character’s emotions. You could chart […]