The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is one of those American TV shows which, like Little House on the Prairie and Leave it to Beaver, is remembered as a euphemism for cloying wholesomeness more than an actual show. If you were told that its main child star David Nelson later […]
Graham Williamson
Johnny Guitar (1954) Oh, Vienna! (Review)
To the unconverted, Westerns are a predictable genre in which the same archetypal characters, settings and situations recur over and over again. To fans, Westerns are a fabulously varied genre in which the same archetypal characters, settings and situations can be combined in an infinite number of original variations. Think, […]
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) Reassessment of Lynch’s ‘pathologically unpleasant’ film is complete (Review)
There was a time when people would have been surprised to see Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on Criterion, you know. Janet Maslin’s infamous New York Times pan (“brain-dead grotesquerie… pathologically unpleasant”) set the tone for the initial Cannes reception, and things did not get any better once it […]
All About Eve (1950) fasten your seatbelts, it’s a double-disc Criterion (Review)
Every era has one or two filmmakers who are so fashionable and so beloved that they introduce a whole generation to classic cinema just through name-dropping films in interviews. For my generation, it was the Coen brothers (and Quentin Tarantino, but since we’re not reviewing a 1970s rape-revenge film we’ll […]
Mirror (1975): Tarkovsky shows us his dreams, his memories and his lasting influence (Review)
Pariah (2011): the most influential 2010s film you haven’t seen (Review)
The Babadook (2014): the reigning champ of modern horror gets the reissue it deserves (Review)
Is seven years too early to call something a classic? Second Sight are hoping it isn’t, with this hulking 4K remaster of Jennifer Kent’s 2014 feature debut The Babadook clocking in with the weight of extras they’ve previously given to canonical works like Walkabout and The Colour of Pomegranates. The […]
Straight Shooting (1917) and Hell Bent (1918): John Ford quietly establishes the Western’s essentials (review)
The history of silent cinema is famously patchy, and it’s not surprising when you look at how these films were churned out. Straight Shooting, the first film in Eureka Masters of Cinema’s double-bill of silent-era John Ford films, is the earliest surviving film from the future director of The Searchers. […]