Justin Kurzel is a filmmaker who understands dread and how to instil this feeling in his audience. Across his oeuvre, Kurzel has consistently created environments and narratives that create a sense of dread through intimate framing that bring the viewer queasily close, familiar spaces where horrific events occur and performances […]
Movies & Documentaries
The Deer King (2021) Too many characters fail to spoil this sumptuous anime (Cinema Review)
Once upon a time the name Production IG carried a certain gravitas. With works such as the 1995 film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, the eerily seductive Blood: The Last Vampire and later to be recognised by the great Hollywood machine in the form of Quentin Tarantino (who requested […]
Summertime (1955): David Lean’s favourite David Lean film (Blu-Ray Review)
Asked to name a David Lean film, most people would plump for Lawrence of Arabia or The Bridge on the River Kwai before they mentioned Summertime. Yet this holiday romance was Lean’s favourite of his own movies, and Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray suggests plenty of reasons why. Before he became […]
Universal Terror: A Collection of Comforting Karloff Cinema (1937/1944/1952)(Blu-ray Review)
It cannot be overstated how much Boris Karloff’s performance in Frankenstein deserves its iconic status. The physicality and emotional expressiveness he brings to the Monster still have emotional resonance and rightly made Karloff a star. However, he had already been acting for over a decade by this point and Frankenstein […]
Larks on a String (1969): saved from the scrapheap of censorship (Review)
Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String, released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Second Run, won the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlin International Film Festival – an impressive feat for any film, but a remarkable one when you consider Menzel’s film was twenty-one years old at that point. […]
Manifesto (2022) Forlorn yet unbowed (Cinema Review)
Manifesto, currently doing the rounds in selected cinemas, is the final instalment in the Hope Trilogy from Liverpudlian director Daniel Draper. The previous films in this series included the Dennis Skinner documentary Nature of the Beast and The Big Meeting, a documentary about the Durham Miners Gala. Slotted neatly in […]
Extreme Prejudice (1987) Jack of all Genres, Master of Some? (Blu-ray Review)
The 1980s can be defined by many elements. Big hair and shoulder pads, bright colours, rampant consumerism. Cinematically, the decade saw the development of a particular type of action movie, a sub-genre that reconstituted American masculinity severely wounded by the Vietnam War with Reaganite assertion and nationalism. Indeed, the presidency […]
True Things (2021) Looking for Love in all the Wrong Places (Blu-ray Review)
Director Harry Wootliff’s new film, released to Blu-ray this week by Picturehouse Entertainment is True Things, an adaptation of the acclaimed 2010 novel by Deborah Kay Davies, True Things About Me. It stars Ruth Wilson (who is also on producing duties with fellow thesp Jude Law) and Tom Burke and […]
Tremors 4K (1990) Electric Paced Creature Feature & ‘Modern’ Classic (Blu-ray Review)
Tremors, Ron Underwood’s 1990 creature feature & ode to the classics made in the 50s, is there any movie that is served worse by the franchise it spawned? Based on the fact that it has gone out of control, spanning a further 23 films – at the time of writing […]
Wayfinder (2022): a wilderness that could do with more wildness (Review)
Normally, when reviewing a debut feature, it’s fruitless to look to the director’s back catalogue for comparison points. Either they’re so new that there aren’t any, or you relegate yourself to pointing out the obvious. (Try not to fall off your chair, but I think Emma Seligman’s 2018 short Shiva […]