Over the years of covering home video releases, I have discovered some new favourites; equally, I have been subject to some of the worst films I’ve ever seen. One of the latter was Doom Asylum, a film so inept I was speechless. The director of that film was Richard Friedman, […]
Movies & Documentaries
Donbass: Episodes of lunacy in Eastern Ukraine (Review)
Welcome to the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine. It’s under the control of the separatists, and the lot of the inhabitants is not a happy one. If you haven’t been bombed out of your home, you’ve probably been injured in a bus attack, or blackmailed by the police, or subjected […]
The Witch Part 1, The Subversion: …and the Girl who bridged two South Korea’s (Review)
The Witch Part 1: the Subversion is the latest directorial effort from the man behind New World and I saw the Devil writer, Park Hoon-Jung, and it is unlike either of those high profile movies. New World is a prominent gangster epic (of comparable stature to A Dirty Carnival), I […]
Heat and Dust: A dual narrative of sexual and imperial politics (Review)
There’s an anecdote about Heat and Dust from producer Ismail Merchant in Robert Emmet Long’s 1993 book The Films of Merchant Ivory that I’ve always liked because I think it says a lot about not only the cultural differences between the British film industry and Hollywood but also the different […]
One, Two, Three (1961): Billy Wilder’s Satirical Greatest Hits
Mad and hectic, One, Two, Three is a Cold War satire that refuses to be one thing – slow. Here you have all the cast bellowing orders to each other like World War Three is on the horizon, the pacing zips by, and André Previn’s lively score blasts the classic […]
The Song of Bernadette: a film of faith, but not blind faith (Review)
There’s a common lament among certain American Christian bloggers that Hollywood doesn’t make movies with spiritual content like it used to, which to this writer’s eyes does a disservice to interesting modern films about Christianity – The Tree of Life, Silence, First Reformed et al – and also glosses over […]
To Sleep With Anger: the eternally youthful Charles Burnett (Review)
The 2003 Martin Scorsese-produced HBO anthology series The Blues featured a lot of big-name directors offering their take on America’s centrally important musical genre. Yet most critics agreed that the best episode wasn’t directed by Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders or Scorsese himself. It was the episode Warming by the Devil’s […]
Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz (Review)
The number of bums on cinema seats may be falling and streaming platform’s as numerous as they are unstoppable, with home video falling somewhere between the two. Even so, there will always be a place for DVD and Blu-ray collectors thanks to labels giving boutique releases to the weird, wonderful […]
Stanley, a Man of Variety (2016): Timothy Spall’s surreal comic trip, for better and worse (Review)
It has long been said that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin, and this has never been more true than in the common link of great personal tragedy that can be found in many a quintessentially British comedian from yesteryear. Think about them; Tony Hancock, an […]
Ikarie XB-1 (1963): The best Space & Soap Opera you’ve never seen (Review)
In the 1960s, Soviet and Eastern Bloc sci-fi cinema was full of hope and the promise of a technologically enhanced future. How could it not be? Soviet technology was winning the space race against the decadent West. This may have been due to the West spending millions of dollars in […]