Released to Blu-ray by Arrow Video on the 6th of this month, Walk on the Wild Side is certainly a film with a good pedigree. Based on a novel by Nelson Algren published six years earlier, it is directed by Edward Dmytryk, the Canadian-born American filmmaker who had a very […]
Mark Cunliffe
The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings (1976) Playing Ball With Motown Productions (Review)
Jagged Edge (1985) The’80s Neo-Noir that Pre-empts Basic Instinct (Review)
The 1980s saw the return of noir in Hollywood. Heralded as the neo-noir, these films revelled in their adult thriller status, creating sub-genres such as the yuppie in peril movie and the erotic thriller. It was arguably Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 movie Body Heat that kickstarted the whole revival, making stars […]
Bringing Up Baby (1938) I Can’t Give You Anything But Love (Review)
Beauty and the Beast (1978) A Grim Fairytale (Review)
The film opens in a mist-shrouded, decaying forest. A band of grimy-looking travellers on horseback, pulling covered wagons are traversing this ominous terrain, accompanied only by the forbidding sounds of the wild. One in their number, a female, anxiously announces that danger will befall them if they continue – but […]
Adoption (1975) A Personal Film from an Unsung Female Director (Review)
Released to Blu-ray by Second Run this week is Adoption, or Örökbefogadás to give it its native Hungarian title. A 1975 film from director Márta Mészáros, it tells the story of Kata (Katelin Berek), a forty-three-year-old factory worker embroiled in a longing-standing love affair with a married man, Jóska (László […]
The Night of the Hunter (1955): The First Shall Be Last and the Last Shall Be First (Review)
By the late 1940s, it seemed that Charles Laughton, that great Scarborough-born star of the silver screen, was losing interest in acting. Believing his performances in films like The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Rembrandt (1936) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) were […]
Before Tonight is Over (1965) “Someone Will Die” (Review)
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982); So Fast Even Modern Hollywood Hasn’t Caught Up With it Yet (Review)
Released to Criterion Blu-ray this week is the perennial favourite of the American high school teen comedy, 1982’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. A film of debuts – it was the directorial debut of Amy Heckerling, the scriptwriting debut of Cameron Crowe and inevitably launched the careers of many young […]