Scandinavian comedies are perhaps some of the strangest films you’ll ever see, but also magnetic in their charm and quick wit. Whether that would be Stellan Skarsgård as a snow-plough driver going on a killing spree, or a 100-year-old explosive expert escaping from a retirement home for his own adventures […]
Movies & Documentaries
Stalker (1979) Tarkovsky’s Infamous & Unfettered Artistic Vision (Review)
Solaris got the remake, Andrei Rublev got the Vatican’s thumbs-up, and Mirror famously caused Lars von Trier to declare Andrei Tarkovsky was God. But the biggest cultural footprint of all the Russian director’s seven feature films undoubtedly belongs to Stalker. His adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic has inspired a […]
Sweet Bean (2015) Naomi Kawase as bolstered by infusions of documentary realism (Review)
DW Griffith once complained that the ‘modern’ Hollywood movie (he was speaking in 1947, though the trend has not reversed since) lacked “the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movements in a beautiful flowing of the blossoms”. He might have been impressed by Sweet Bean, the new film […]
The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971) Part Giallo Part Murder Mystery and one for the collectors (Review)
The Giallo is the oddest of beasts – formulaic with a wildly eccentric code at the same time. Ostensibly murder mysteries with penchants for violence and sex, they also played host to some of the most visually inventive names ever to grace Italian cinema. The last thing in the world […]
The Shop on the High Street (1965) a perfume to mask the smell of death (Review)
Viewers for whom the former Czechoslovakia is, in the notorious words of Neville Chamberlain, “a faraway country of which we know little”, might be puzzled by one repeated image in Ján Kádar and Elmar Klos’s 1965 Oscar-winner The Shop on the High Street. It’s a huge pyramid erected by Nazi collaborators, […]
The In-Laws (1979) a pure-bred comedy unicorn (Review)
For all the wonders of the 1970s New Hollywood, it’s not rich in classic comedies. Newly reissued by the Criterion Collection, 1979’s The In-Laws remedies that, while also standing up well against the comedy subgenres and styles of the decades before and after. Its premise – a straight-laced dentist is dragged into […]
Solaris (1972) Full of complex ideas and emotions, must be seen at least once (Review)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s third film, following his chilling debut Ivan’s Childhood and the mammoth Andrei Rublev, Solaris is a film that is more about experience and environment than enjoyment or leisure. Clocking in at 2 hours and 40 minutes, this science-fiction voyage into the human soul is anything but fun and […]
Buster Keaton: Complete Short Films – 1917-1923 (Review)
The history of cinema is fascinating when journeying back to its origins, illustrating how much has changed over the course of time. Take science fiction and horror as the prime examples, both are worlds away from their respective zeitgeists – almost as if comparing night with day. Comedy is different […]
Baskin (2015) Nightmare Hell Horror fresh out of Turkey (Review)
For seasoned horror and gore aficionados, Baskin popped up as if from nowhere, whetting many people’s appetites as a brutal gore-fest, something that could satisfy an itch with more substance than other crass films that have emerged on the festival circuit. A Directorial Turkish debut from director Can Evrenol, Baskin starts […]
Burroughs: The Movie (1983) A Bizarre treat for fans of William S. Boroughs (Review)
Howard Brookner was a film student at NYU with Jim Jarmusch and Tom DiCillo when he made a low-budget observational documentary about the most groundbreaking and original American writer of the 20th century, William S Burroughs. It should have been the start of a career to match his classmates, both […]