‘It’s the same old song/ but with a different meaning since you been gone’— Blood Simple is back in cinemas ahead of a blu-ray release by Studiocanal, and there’s no review more pithy than the Four Tops song given pride of place on the film’s soundtrack. I wasn’t even alive […]
Movies & Documentaries
The Howling (1981) The great werewolf transformation movie (Review)
Joe Dante is a beloved man, his films are among the most humble and darkly funny the genre world has to offer. His work is the point which light and dark intersect within the horror and science fiction cannons. That is true save for the exception, that one film which […]
The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl (2017) A Must-See for those feeling Adventurous (Review)
This review has taken a long time. I left it, I left it some more, I left it longer and yet I still can’t wrap my head around the damn thing. The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl is my first exposure to director Masaaki Yuasa and I was not […]
London Film Festival, Part 1: Pre-Gaming
Last Sunday night, on a whim, I took the bus into central London to watch David Lynch’s The Straight Story projected on 35mm film at my favourite independent cinema, the Prince Charles just off Leicester Square. It was almost 9pm, but the square was as crowded as ever. There’s more […]
Vampir Cuadecuc (1971) A Surprisingly Sensual and Beautiful avant-garde Vampire Movie (Review)
Sometime in the early 2000s, a Peruvian government spokesman was forced to testily deny online rumours that some of the country’s cabinet were vampires. “A government cannot go around sucking the blood of its people”, the spokesman claimed, inviting the obvious rejoinder; which government has ever refrained from this? The […]
Certain Women (2016) a grown-up, unironic, realist film about ordinary people going through ordinary challenges (Review)
It’s always an interesting statement of values when a prestige home video label decides to release a recent film. Everyone agrees on Kurosawa, Lang and Welles, but which modern director would you put in their company? In America, the Criterion Collection has got behind Wes Anderson so consistently that it’s […]
Kills on Wheels (2016) Two brilliant, searingly honest films flimsily stuck together (Review)
Representation is the big issue – who is having their stories told and which actors are being deprived of acting opportunities. Unfortunately, race and gender are as far as this dialogue has been extended. People who have lifelong disabilities either by accident or birth are seeing opportunities hoovered up by […]
Dunkirk (1958) A poignant and near peerless World War II Movie (Review)
As a child obsessed with war, I well remember watching Dunkirk, Leslie (father of Barry) Norman’s 1958 film that depicted the events of May-June 1940, when the besieged soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force were stranded on the coast of France, and the combined efforts of the Royal Navy and […]
It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) So overambitious it’s amazing it doesn’t fall apart (Review)
Where, But In America? asked an early working title for Stanley Kramer’s extravagant Ultra Panavision progenitor of the ‘epic comedy’ genre. Scotland is the sensible answer, the planned location of a wacky race that the transatlantic writing duo of William and Tania Rose, famous for Ealing comedies such as The […]
The Tree of the Wooden Clogs (1978) A Classic Example of the Critics Film (Review)
Ermanno Olmi’s 1978 Palme d’Or winner, ‘The Tree of the Wooden Clogs’, has garnered a reputation for being one of the most underrated Italian films ever made, as well as one of the final films of the Neo-Realist movement. Clocking in at just over 3 hours, the audience needs a […]