Growing up as I did in the 1980s, I well remember the original Widows – Lynda La Plante’s 1983 miniseries about four women who have no option but to follow in the footsteps of their late husbands and partners and into a life of crime. It starred Ann Mitchell (now […]
Movies & Documentaries
Death in Venice (1971): Luchino Visconti makes a good film, but a bad adaptation (Review)
A few years before the First World War, the renowned composer Gustav von Aschenbach suffers a serious health scare. He is ordered to take complete rest, so he decides to travel to Venice for an extended holiday. Staying at a high-class hotel, he notices a Polish family there. The children […]
Sister Street Fighter (1974): Stealth Feminist Exploitation Icon? (Review)
Shinichi Chiba (Sonny) became a star in the global kung fu fever inspired by Bruce Lee and the international success of his unfortunate swansong, Enter the Dragon. Like many of his Hong Kong peers, Chiba starred in an awful lot of movies and not many of them good – however, […]
Ugetsu (1953) Mizoguchi, Japan’s most elusive master director (Review)
For all that Kenji Mizoguchi tends to be introduced as one of Japan’s post-war triumvirate of great filmmakers, along with his younger contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, the evidence for such claims has been poorly distributed. This is partly due to the majority of the prolific director’s films being […]
The Prisoner (1955) Alec Guinness’s War of the Words (Review)
For my money, Alec Guinness is one of the greatest British character actors of all time. No matter if he was playing the buck-toothed Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers, or the wise and mysterious Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, Guinness always brought elegance, wit, and charm to his performances. Rewind […]
Kolobos (1999) soft satire, but hard gore (Review)
Let’s spin back to summer, 1999; Big Brother launches in the Netherlands, the public is slowly becoming acclimatised to words like “webcam” and “JPEG”, and the two big horror talking points – Ringu and The Blair Witch Project – take the genre’s regular voyeuristic concerns into an age where VHS […]
Ray & Liz (2018) Trading Memories of a Working-Class North (Review)
The Black Country born photographer and artist Richard Billingham first came to fame in the mid to late 1990s, when his award-winning photographic collection of his working-class parents formed part of Charles Saatchi’s YBA exhibition, ‘Sensation’. At the height of what was known as ‘Cool Britannia’, Billingham’s uncompromising look to the […]
Possum (2018) a bleakness from beyond the dark place (Review)
Part [The] Babadook and part David Lynch fuelled nightmare, Matthew Holness’s directorial debut, Possum, is as bleak and oppressive as psychological horror gets. Unfortunately, I get the impression that Holness would’ve been better suited turning Possum into a portmanteau film rather than a feature of its own. And that’s fine, […]
Sink the Bismarck! (1960) A British Stiff-Upper Lip Vision of Heroism (Review)
Directed by Lewis Gilbert, the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! tells the true-life story of the Royal Navy’s mission to track down and destroy the eponymous pride of the German fleet and scourge of Atlantic shipping. Making it’s UK Blu-ray debut on the Eureka Classics label, it’s a distinctive film […]
The Boys In The Band (1970) After Stonewall, Before Pride (Review)
He may be associated with the tough, transgressive American cinema of the 1970s, but there’s a part of William Friedkin that would have made a first-rate Old Hollywood journeyman. Peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader have recently been making personal, self-penned projects, but Friedkin’s 21st-century career renaissance came […]