Based on a novel by Jim Crace, Harvest marks the English-language debut of Athina Rachel Tsangari. It was released to UK cinemas in July of this year and is currently available to stream on Mubi. The film is a curious, absorbing tale, set over seven hallucinatory days, in a village with no name, in an […]
Mark Cunliffe
Senior Contributor Mark's first cinematic experience was watching the Cannon and Ball vehicle, The Boys in Blue. He hasn't looked back since. Hailing from St Helens, he is an occasional contributor to Arrow DVD, writing booklet inlay essays on a variety of titles, including Children of Men and The Great Escape. He is a reviewer with IndieMDB and has also written a chapter for Ste Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence's book, Scarred For Life Vol II. Other sites he has written for include We Are Cult, Horrified, and America's left-leaning news outlet ZNetwork. Publications he has written articles for include Stat Magazine and the fanzine Undefined Boundary: The Journal of Psychick Albion. He is also a regular contributor to the Geek Show's podcasts, including Pop Screen and the Uncut series, and he can be found on Letterboxd.
Shoeshine (1946) Innocence Lost in the Remnants of World War II Rome
Released with a brand new 4K digital restoration by Criterion to Blu-ray and UHD this week, Shoeshine is a 1946 neorealist drama from Vittorio De Sica that has often been hailed as the Italian filmmaker’s first masterpiece and became the first film to win the Academy Award for Best International […]
Reputation (2024) A Micro-Budget Feature with a Rising Star
Released on digital platforms from Monday 28th July, Reputation is the feature debut from Martin Law. Its star is James Nelson-Joyce, a Liverpudlian actor who, after some solid supporting work – in productions such as Jimmy McGovern’s Time, Stephen Merchant’s Outlaws, Steven Knight’s A Thousand Blows, and the Brink’s Mat […]
Autism and the Arts: Poetry with Peter Street (2025) Claiming Your Space as a Working Class Creative in the Cultural Landscape
Nottinghamshire born and Greater Manchester based filmmaker Brett Gregory (director of the self-financed, coruscating, and multi-award winning 2022 indie feature Nobody Loves You and You Don’t Deserve to Exist and the 2024 short film adaptation of Kafka’s Before the Law), returns to his documentarian roots for his latest production. Autism […]
Outside the Blue Box: Casualty: Results by Ben Aaronovitch
To understand where Casualty was in 1990, we must first go back in time one year earlier, to 1989. The fourth season of the hit BBC medical drama, which had begun life three years earlier in 1986, saw the show undergo some changes. The original producer, Geraint Morris, had left […]
Falling Into Place (2023) From Meet-Cute to Ugly Realities
Released to cinemas on 6th June, Falling into Place is the directorial debut from the German actor Aylin Tezel, who has also written the screenplay and takes the lead role of Kira. Set in the urban metropolis of London and the windswept and rural Skye, Tezel’s seemingly personal film is a […]
Outside the Blue Box: The Andrew Cartmel Masterplan of Casualty (BBC, 1990)
You all know Andrew Cartmel, right? He’s the man with the plan. The Cartmel Masterplan to be exact. As script editor on Doctor Who from 1987 to 1989, his Masterplan shaped the final three years of the show’s classic era and would have gone on to set the tone for the series […]
Darling (1965) The New Morality of the 1960s
Celebrating its sixtieth anniversary with a return to selected cinemas from May 30th and a Blu-ray release by Studio Canal’s Vintage Classics label on 16th June, Darling is John Schlesinger’s multi-Bafta and Academy Award winning 1965 starring the impossibly glamourous trio of Julie Christie, Dirk Bogarde, and Laurence Harvey. It […]
The Railroad Man (1956) A Year in the Life of a Working Class Family
The second Radiance release this week is Pietro Germi’s 1956 film The Railroad Man, or Il ferroviere in its native Italian. As well as directing and having a hand in the screenplay, Germi also stars in the lead role of Andrea Marcocci, the train operator of the title and patriarch of a working-class […]
Themroc (1973) The Urban Caveman and the Red Triangle
Released to Radiance this week is Claude Faraldo’s notorious 1973 French satire, Themroc, a film that gained its notoriety here in the UK on account of it being the first film broadcast in Channel 4’s Red Triangle season on 19th September 1986. The Red Triangle season was the informal title […]