Buster Keaton enjoyed a wave of popularity rivalled only by Charlie Chaplin. His later works aren’t as fondly remembered as the likes of Modern Times or The Great Dictator, but College is a short and sweet example of just how great a performer and director Keaton was, and why he managed to compete with the […]
Movies & Documentaries
The Strangers (2008) One performance shy of the Modern Answer to Home Invasion Movies (Review)
Is horror, as a conglomerate of sub-genres, scary? Even as a fully signed up fan, I’d have to say no. Monster, both scientific and supernatural, have a distance to them, they don’t dig deep into the part of the subconscious where it becomes impossible to turn off as you can […]
Go West (1925) Keaton at his most charming getting the jump on the Western (Review)
After the somewhat serious tones found in Our Hospitality, I was ready for Buster Keaton’s work to blow me away entirely with a film that focused more on its comedy than it did on budding romances and family grievances. A Western comedy from one of the great minds of the silent era, […]
Eternal Beauty (2020) Dramady That Gets Mental Health Right (Review)
Craig Roberts, the pinched face and seemingly eternally adolescent Welsh actor best known for his starring role in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, follows up his directorial debut Just Jim with Eternal Beauty, an offbeat comedy-drama that approaches the tricky subject of mental illness and is hitting cinemas from Friday October 2nd. […]
I Monster (1971) A horror monster masterclass from Christopher Lee (Review)
After seeing them feature in a plentiful amount of Hammer Horror films, I feel like I’m coming to terms with the charms of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Their ability to turn seemingly standard, flatlining stories of beasts and monsters into something acerbic and tense is a testament to their abilities […]
Five Graves to Cairo (1943) Influential in Many Surprising Ways (Review)
One of the most curious Allied operations to occur during World War Two was arguably Operation Copperhead, masterminded by one Brigadier Dudley Clarke. A small military deception, Copperhead saw the Allies dupe the German high command whose intelligence expected General Bernard Montgomery to play a significant role in the 1944 […]
Our Hospitality (1923) An early Buster Keaton classic that excels as a narrative and a silent comedy (Review)
The silent era of comedy is one of the few genres that holds up rather well on the whole. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton are the big names everyone associates this period with, and rightly so. The trio provided us with some of the most memorable and engaging […]
The Painted Bird (2019): Arthouse or Endurance Test? (Review)
Václav Marhoul’s WWII Eastern European-set film opens with a boy’s pet ferret being set alight and burned alive by a group of bullies. The sight of the ferret, disorientated, panicked and squealing in agony as it attempts the impossible and outrun the flames that so quickly engulf its body, ought […]
Melancholic (2018) Darkly Hilarious Romantic Dramedy with added Yakuza violence
Before launching into Third Window Films latest release in Seiji Tanaka’s Melancholic – allow me the indulgence of explaining what made me fall in love with East Asian cinema. Japanese, Chinese and Korean cinema take scant regard for tone or even genre, its much more common in that part of […]
Real (2019): breezy but uneven cycle through working-class romance (Review)
There’s something about bicycles in film, isn’t there? Ever since Vittoria de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, the two-wheeled transport has been used to denote a kind of child’s-eye realism by Ridley Scott (Boy and Bicycle), the Dardenne brothers (The Kid With a Bike) and Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda). Even in the more […]