Curzon Artificial Eye releases the penultimate film from Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography in Nostalgia. Post-Stalker, Tarkovsky planned to make “The First Day” – a film that would interrogate atheism in the Soviet Union. Long story short. He had a major confrontation with Goskino (USSR committee for cinematography) whereby the half-finished film […]
Rob Simpson
Chief Editor
Host of the Uncut Network. With a love of movies kicked off by Hong Kong Action and Claymation Monsters, Rob has forever been cradled in the bosom of Cinema. Rob has his hands in many a pie, including no budget film making. Filthy
Hiroshi Inagaki – The Samurai Trilogy (1955-56) Not Quite Samurai Classics (Review)
History is dense with folk icons; men and women whose stories have translated with great success to the cinema with the Wong Fei Hung’s and Spartacus’s of the world over-represented. Here in Britain, we tend to treat our historical figures with the wrong side of a sharp blade, abandoning them […]
Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection (1972)(Review)
More often than not exploitation cinema has laid in the bed it has made, keeping away from art, influence or acclaim. Exploitation is generally an isolated home for those who want to craft transgressive, liberated cinema – qualities that usually lead forwards bad taste. There are always exceptions, films which […]
The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971) Part Giallo Part Murder Mystery and one for the collectors (Review)
The Giallo is the oddest of beasts – formulaic with a wildly eccentric code at the same time. Ostensibly murder mysteries with penchants for violence and sex, they also played host to some of the most visually inventive names ever to grace Italian cinema. The last thing in the world […]
Buster Keaton: Complete Short Films – 1917-1923 (Review)
The history of cinema is fascinating when journeying back to its origins, illustrating how much has changed over the course of time. Take science fiction and horror as the prime examples, both are worlds away from their respective zeitgeists – almost as if comparing night with day. Comedy is different […]
Andrei Rublev (1966) One of the greatest historical epics ever made (Review)
Following on from Ivan’s Childhood, Curzon Artificial Eye continues their retrospective on Russian Grandmaster Andrei Tarkovsky with Andrei Rublev. The second feature from Russia’s most celebrated film export follows the titular fifteenth-century iconographer as he walks the lands – starting when he is young and idealistic and ending 3 hours […]
Mustang (2015) a timeless debut of rare and bullish brilliance (Review)
Prisons aren’t just buildings to house and punish those who have wronged society, they can also be a psychological and social construct, the flexibility of this notion has seen it bend and twist into one of fiction’s most well-travelled concepts. As far as cinema is concerned, the path well-travelled begins […]
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) Still a powerful, morality Western 75 years later (Review)
The introduction is one of the most underrated aspects of home video. One as good as Peter Stanfield provides on Arrow’s release of William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident transforms a film – providing a context, drawing attention to details and being about the most proactive way to enhance a […]
Suture (1993) Philosophy of the self and the elephant in the room (Review)
A keen suspension of disbelief is key to enjoy genres founded on wonder, whimsy and exaggeration, not having a healthy penchant to believe the unbelievable locks swathes of the more imaginative hues of cinema behind locked doors. Curious it is then that 1993’s existentialist noir about the reconstruction of the […]
Our Little Sister (2015) The generous, life-affirming heart of Modern Japanese cinema (Review)
Hirokazu Koreeda emerged on British shores in 2013 with the dual release of I Wish and Like Father Like Son, before that he was known only to those adventurous few who delved deep into World Cinema. His work inherited the humility of Ozu and Mizoguchi, only he has added a […]