Two years after he dropped the critically lauded Sidney Poitier picture, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Stanley Kramer flew over to Italy to begin what-would-be his next big feature, an adaptation of Robert Crichton’s first novel, The Secret of Santa Vittoria. Kramer, the acclaimed director behind the courtroom drama, Judgement […]
Movies & Documentaries
Psychomania (1973) Black Magic, Low Budgets and glorious British camp (Review)
Rational thought is the last thing in the world you should bring to B-movies, so much so it’ll be difficult to even pass the title card of Psychomania – the latest release on BFI’s wonderful Flipside brand – before the hokum hits the fan. Don Sharp (Rasputin, the Mad Monk) […]
Tartuffe (1925) Dynamic, daring and full of beautiful compositions, it’s definitely more than lesser Murnau (Review)
In Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film The Silence of the Sea, Howard Vernon’s tragically naive Nazi lieutenant tries to curry favour with the French family he’s staying with by praising their culture. He says his Fatherland has but one emblematic literary genius, Goethe, but France is spoiled for choice with Zola, […]
Cat People (1942) one of the most singular, groundbreaking horror movies in American history (Review)
After the debut film by their golden boy Orson Welles underperformed at the box office, RKO Studios decided to refocus their efforts on commercial genre work. They decided to create a new “horror unit” to make inexpensive frighteners and put Val Lewton, a former employee of legendary producer David O […]
Nostalgia (1983) Diving into Tarkovsky’s Deep End (Review)
Curzon Artificial Eye releases the penultimate film from Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography in Nostalgia. Post-Stalker, Tarkovsky planned to make “The First Day” – a film that would interrogate atheism in the Soviet Union. Long story short. He had a major confrontation with Goskino (USSR committee for cinematography) whereby the half-finished film […]
The Glass Key (1942) & The Veronica Lake Show (Review)
In his 1970 essay Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir, Raymond Durgnat suggests that the genre’s most common topics developed as a method of plausible deniability. As the Red Scare hotted up, left-leaning directors could address corruption in, say, prisons or boxing and have it stand as a microcosm […]
The Human Condition (1959) a must-see for any fan of world cinema (Review)
WWII is a frequently used setting throughout the course of cinema history. No matter what, every critically acclaimed filmmaker must have at least one film set in-between the time period of 1939 – 1945. Steven Spielberg presented the horrors of the Holocaust in unflinching black-and-white realism in Schlinder’s List. Wolfgang […]
Hiroshi Inagaki – The Samurai Trilogy (1955-56) Not Quite Samurai Classics (Review)
History is dense with folk icons; men and women whose stories have translated with great success to the cinema with the Wong Fei Hung’s and Spartacus’s of the world over-represented. Here in Britain, we tend to treat our historical figures with the wrong side of a sharp blade, abandoning them […]
Fox and his Friends & Chinese Roulette (1975) The many faces of Fassbinder (Review)
Most nations experienced the 1970s as a long, paranoid hangover following the freedom and optimism of the 1960s. But pity poor Germany, which got all of the worst of the 1970s without a ’60s worth talking about. The signature political event of the 1960s in Germany was nothing to do […]
Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection (1972)(Review)
More often than not exploitation cinema has laid in the bed it has made, keeping away from art, influence or acclaim. Exploitation is generally an isolated home for those who want to craft transgressive, liberated cinema – qualities that usually lead forwards bad taste. There are always exceptions, films which […]