At the beginning and the end of 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes – now reissued on Blu-Ray by Arrow home video – clouds of dust blow through the desert-like an all-American version of Hammer’s oppressive fog. It’s an early sign that writer-director Wes Craven is more concerned with atmosphere and […]
Movies & Documentaries
The Clan (2015) Carries on the Baton for Argentine Crime Cinema (Review)
Following his stint in the Spanish-language anthology film, 7 Days in Havana which was undertaken by several filmmakers and actors from the golden boy, Benicio del Toro to Emir Kusturica. Pablo Trapero returns to the director’s chair with a kaboom in The Clan, Argentina’s entry for the Best Foreign Language […]
Paris Blues (1962) Comes to Life with the Jazz and the Style (Review)
Here’s a less-than-fun fact; when Martin Ritt’s Paris Blues was released in 1961, the opening flirtation between Paul Newman and Diahann Carroll would have been a crime in 22 American states. Released on Blu-Ray fifty-five years later as part of the British Film Institute’s Black Star season, it is noticeable […]
Dark Water (2002) The Dramatic Face of J-Horror and Creeping Dread (Review)
In a newly recorded interview, director Hideo Nakata not only talks about his rise through the studio system and his big break directing the original Ring, but he also talks about Dramatic Horror. Such a notion is only given credibility by the art-house, independent and marginalized, even in the parts […]
Cosmos (2015) Żuławski ransacks his knowledge of art and pop culture for the most surreal swansong (Review)
It’s a strange world, but has it ever looked stranger than it does through the eyes of Witold Gombrowicz and Andrzej Żuławski? Żuławski was the late Polish director whose film Possession became quite the artiest thing on the Department of Public Prosecutions’ infamous ‘video nasties’ list. Gombrowicz was one of a generation of European authors who […]
One Million Years BC (1966) Harryhausen, Dinosaurs and the legendary bikini (Review)
If you’re a man of a certain age who remembers getting strange feelings when their parents let them watch the dinosaur movie on TV, then you already know whether or not you should buy StudioCanal’s Blu-Ray of One Million Years B.C. Don Chaffey’s film has an iconic stature for a […]
Creepy (2016) Menacing, and gives the bird to decades of police procedural (Review)
Kiyoshi Kurosawa is no stranger to 2016, already his previous film, Journey to the Shore, saw release on Masters of Cinema and that charming albeit misunderstood film took a fascinating posture on saying goodbye. His second film of the year debuted during the London Film festival and, of the two, […]
The Sacrifice (1986) Tarkovsky’s Acutely Intelligent Swansong (Review)
Released just six months before his death from cancer, Andrei Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice is commonly held to be an uncomfortably elegiac, melancholy note for the great director to bow out on, which considering the rest of his films were hardly Duck Soup is saying something. In tackling the central threat […]
Electra My Love (1974) The world’s finest historical, political dance movie (Review)
Whether Slovak, Hungarian or South East Asian, a country’s cinematic output requires a degree of cultural and historical context; add (the) former Czechoslovakia, and you have the cross-section that makes up the DNA of Second Run’s remit. Nuances naturally occur, but the consistencies in these nations are modern histories demarcated […]
Carmen Jones (1954) Influential Black Musical with a weird relationship to race (Review)
Your reviewer can sometimes be guilty of dancing around the less quantifiable aspects of enjoying a movie, so let’s talk about star presence. As soon as she appears on screen in Otto Preminger’s 1950 musical – reissued for the first time on Blu-Ray by the BFI – Dorothy Dandridge has […]