The Assassin (Hsiao-Hsien Hou) is loosely based on a seventh-century folk tale about a female assassin assigned with re-establishing equilibrium to the corrupt Tang Dynasty court. Shu Qi plays Nie Yinniang, the formidable female protagonist, who has been trained since the age of Ten to be a silent slayer for […]
Movies & Documentaries
Expresso Bongo (1959) Cliff Richard in pre-swinging London Rock N’ Roll Musical (Review)
Let us imagine the pitch: a hotshot young writer and a director whose career spans groundbreaking horror, gritty drama and sexploitation decide to make a musical. But not just any musical – this would be a musical powered by stage performances, rather than the familiar contrivance of people bursting into […]
Victoria (2015) The German Crime film that cracked the “one-take” nut (Review)
Even as far back as 1948, the one-take film was aspiration with Hitchcock’s Rope. An endeavour similar to Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s Birdman or Gustavo Hernández’s The Silent House, both he and Hitchcock used the practice of clean plates, filming areas or objects featuring no actors or moving objects to cut […]
Journey to the Shore (2015) trades in the haunted house for a ghost story (Review)
Horror has many go to Monsters; one will have its turn in the limelight before passing it on to the next. The subtleties of titles like the Uninvited or the Haunting have subsided only to be replaced by the cacophony of Amityville Horror or Insidious. However, take Japan or many […]
Outlaw Gangster VIP (1968/9) Making a star of Tetsuya Watari (Review)
The term ‘Studio film’ within the contemporary vernacular is used as a derogatory statement; a catch-all to encompass a focus on making money over quality cinema. While that is certainly also true in Japan, there are also a selection of studios that have gone down in legend – Toho, and […]
Beat Girl (1959) British B-Movie that found a 2nd life in 60s America (Review)
At the start of Ben Wilson’s 2007 history book Decency and Disorder, there are excerpts from letters written by French citizens who visited Britain and were horrified by the rudeness, salaciousness and drunkenness of life over here. That was in the early nineteenth century. One strict course of Victorian values later, […]
Yakuza Apocalypse (2015) The Best Punk Rock Kaiju Movie (Review)
Between 1998 & 2001, Takashi Miike’s prolific nature gained him worldwide notoriety with his V-cinema run. Audition, Ichi the Killer, Dead or Alive, and the Happiness of the Katakuri’s earned him legions of fans worldwide. Even if he isn’t quite as productive as he used to be, he still manages […]
The Last Command (1928) The inaugural Best Actor Oscar Award Winner (Review)
By the time Josef von Sternberg made The Last Command in 1928, his lead actor had become such an institution in Germany that an entire genre was named after him. The Jannings-Film was used to describe any movie where Emil Jannings, the bearish icon of German silent cinema, played a […]
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) and Other Works by Dziga Vertov (Review)
“I am the Camera’s Eye. I am the Machine that shows you the world as I alone see it. Starting from today I am forever free of human immobility. I am in perpetual movement. I approach and draw away from things-I crawl under them-I climb on them-I am on the […]
Akira Kurosawa’s Ran (1985) Home to one of the greatest battle scenes of all time (Review)
Shakespeare’s stories, character and language might be what reel us in, but it’s the mysteries that can engender an obsession. From Sigmund Freud, who famously pored over a psychiatric diagnosis of Prince Hamlet, to John Sutherland and Cedric Watts, who published an entire book (Henry V, War Criminal?) on the […]