“I started at the top”, Orson Welles quips in F for Fake, “and have been working my way down ever since”. After the great man’s death in 1985 Welles’s gag became something worryingly close to consensus. Obituary after obituary tutted about what a shame it was that he never lived up […]
Movies & Documentaries
Apostasy (2017) a splash of cold water on the sometimes sleepy face of British filmmaking (Review)
At what point does the care and attention of a close-knit community become too close, evolving into a punishing system of abuse and control? What separates legitimate beliefs from the parasitic, overbearing decrees of an extremist cult? If you’re looking for ambiguous and equivocating answers to those questions, don’t watch […]
Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! (1963) All Hail Suzuki, King of Gonzo! (Review)
It has been a banner year for Seijun Suzuki thanks to Arrow (Academy & Video), with the release of two boxsets featuring 10 of his early Nikkatsu movies [video], the Taishō Roman Trilogy and now, the latest of the bunch, Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell, Bastards! To be fair, […]
The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tail (1971) Sergio Martino’s Giallo Detours (Review)
While watching Arrow Video’s latest, The Case Of The Scorpion’s Tail, a thought struck me. Be you a fan of horror or genre cinema, as much as you’d like the opposite to be true, you can’t know about all movements and styles – it’s that very reason why, I, personally, […]
King of Hearts (1966) Endearingly Silly Anti-War film made in the mould of Ealing (Review)
Philippe De Broca’s 1966 cult comedy, King of Hearts, is a colourful, charming, and silly little film that fits in line with war-time farces like Richard Attenborough’s Oh, What a Lovely War! In the underlying message of King of Hearts, De Broca is warning us that a closely-knit society is […]
A Taste of Honey (1961) Tom Jones (1963) & The Children’s Hour (1961) (Review)
Yes, I am yoking three reviews and three films together, but bear with me, and we can ride on this makeshift oxcart together. It’s not just that two of them are from the BFI’s Woodfall collection, a recent boxed set of British New Wave classics; or that all three are […]
Crowhurst (2017) if you prefer your biopics a little more obscure and experimental (Review)
In October 1968, a weekend sailor and engineer attempted to sail into the history books with one of the last great adventures of the twentieth century and the new Elizabethan age, the race to circumnavigate the globe single-handed and without any stops. That man was Donald Crowhurst and although he […]
I Kill Giants (2017) loses the magic of the original IMAGE graphic novel (Review)
In a small coastal American town, the middle-schooler Barbara has a secret: she must save the lives of everyone around her from murderous giants. Virtually nobody believes that giants exist, of course, but that’s simply because nobody bothers to look at the evidence. Barbara may be bullied at school, she […]
Samuel Fuller at Columbia (1937-61)(Review)
There are two schools of thought on what makes a good box set. The first is what you might call the blockbuster principle: just assemble as impressive a collection of hits as you can. Certainly, that works – there’s a reason there are so many anthologies of Hitchcock and Coen […]
The Loneliness of a Long Distance Runner (1962) one of the greatest endings to a film ever (Review)
Based on Alan Sillitoe’s 1959 first-person short story of the same name, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner was an obvious choice for Woodfall Films following the success they had had with a previous adaptation of a Sillitoe novel; Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. It tells the story of […]