There’s a shift in Doctor Who towards the end of Jon Pertwee’s run which doesn’t actually affect much of what you’re watching, but it had a seismic impact on how people watched it. From 1963 to 1972, Doctor Who existed in an eternal present: the only recurring monsters were ones the average person in […]
Graham Williamson
Senior Contributor
Doctor Who A-Z #71: Invasion of the Dinosaurs (1974)
Invasion of the Dinosaurs was the final Doctor Who story to be released on VHS, implying that even late-in-the-range releases like a box set of Underworld and The Time Monster were considered a more desirable consumer item than this. This is a strange anti-accolade, and not just because of the […]
Doctor Who A-Z #70: The Time Warrior (1973-4)
It’s not always easy to judge which Doctor Who stories are important – not at the time, and not even in retrospect. A retrospective view, for instance, will probably pick Dennis Spooner’s The Time Meddler as being the story which set the template for all modern-day stories set in Earth’s […]
Films by Zoltán Huszárik (1963-1979): life, death and one incredible box set
As Blu-Ray upgrades go, it’s a hell of a glow-up. Second Run released the Hungarian director Zoltán Huszárik’s debut feature Szindbád on DVD in 2011; its cult in Anglophone countries can be largely attributed to this, given that neither the film nor the works of its source author Gyula Krúdy […]
Life is Cheap… But Toilet Paper is Expensive (1989) Even Wilder than the Title Suggests
For all its association with high style, there’s always been a documentary element to film noir. The genre is rooted in social commentary, and took every opportunity to get off the sound stages and into the streets once camera technology became lightweight enough to do that. You can even point […]
Zero (2024): Senegalese suspense from a new studio with a big mission
Asked why Superman isn’t performing as well in international markets as it is in the States, James Gunn wondered whether a hero so linked to “truth, justice and the American way” would always suffer in the current political climate. Whether you buy that as an explanation in this particular case […]
The Box Man (2024): Far from Boxed-in Cinema from sporadically productive genius
Gakuryu Ishii is one of those artists like Terrence Malick, Thomas Pynchon and Daniel Day-Lewis, whose legend rests in part on their long absences. He spent a decade in the wilderness after directing his extraordinary black comedy The Crazy Family before returning with 1994’s Angel Dust, and he currently averages […]
Divine Love (2019): An All-Too-Conceivable Dystopia
Satirists these days are given to complaining that their job is impossible, that the slate of clownish authoritarian world leaders cannot be made more preposterous than they already are. Spare a thought, though, for writers of dystopian fiction. For decades, these stories enjoyed an exalted status. They were the fictions […]
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999): Kiarostami in the country
The theme of the stressed-out, materialistic big city professional finding renewal and redemption in a small town is one mainstream cinema goes back to time and time again, and it usually makes my teeth itch. If big-name American directors really found Midwestern small towns as life-affirming as they claim to, […]
Ishanou (1990) Indian regional cinema probes the mystery of faith
Standard screenwriting advice has it that nothing confuses an audience faster than unclear character motivations, but some of the most powerful stories succeed by refusing to do exactly that. We never learn what made Daniel Plainview so embittered, or why Iago hates Othello, and nobody worth listening to would say […]