Winner of the 2015 ‘Un Certain regard’ strand at Cannes and a film of intriguing realism is Rams. Grímur Hákonarson’s critically acclaimed film is the story of a rural Icelandic sheep farming community ravaged by the fatal, degenerative disease Scrapie. The film opens with Brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi […]
Movies & Documentaries
The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973) One of the Ultimate Anti-Gangster Movies (Review)
Cinema has long been entrenched in mythologising the career criminal. Far from reality, these archetypes have evolved into marketable heroes. Perhaps the grim reality of these lives has become more prominent in the last decade or so, but back in the 1970s, such sombre realism was a scarce commodity. Enter […]
The Ninja Trilogy (1981-1984) High Camp of the 80s Ninja Craze (Review)
Cannon films where rarely more iconic than when they produced the Ninja Trilogy. In 2016, films that pay homage to the richness of the Eighties, or the type of genre silliness that ensued, seek to exploit that which came before through the lens of irony. While blaxploitation, producers like Corman […]
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) Rarely been bettered in the 57 years since (Review)
Forgive the sentimentality, but one of your correspondent’s all-time idols has just died unexpectedly (you know who it is- it’s not Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart) and it is hard to review a film about loss, pain and memory without wondering about all these obituaries, and who they are for. Perhaps a […]
Escape from the Liberty Cinema (1990) intoxicatingly rebellious riff on the Purple Rose of Cairo (Review)
Second Run are one of the more remarkable labels operating in the UK, focusing on forgotten and obscure Eastern European films during the past decade. There is one concurrent theme common in many of the titles they pluck from obscurity, their political awareness. The by-product of this is a dual-pronged […]
Just Jim (2015) Just another low-key actor/director project, only with a surrealist edge (Review)
Many actors take the leap from in front of the camera to behind it, while more common for established names who want to try something new or complete a passion project they’ve been sat on for years – there has been a swelling of young actors adding themselves to that […]
Day of the Outlaw (1959) The entire history of the Western in a three-act structure (Review)
Westerns and Martial Arts cinema have a remarkable amount in common, for one they remake each other constantly; also, their kinship is important due to them being genre’s that are hard to penetrate for the uninitiated. Both are stuck in a quagmire of form, they are both the definition of […]
The Reflecting Skin (1990) Even with a few wrinkles, this is an anti-vampire masterpiece (Review)
Poet, Author and Film Maker Philip Ridley made his directorial debut in 1990 with this 1950 set American Prairie Horror. Thanks to the pulpy novels read his Dad the young Seth Dove (Jeremy Cooper) believes his secretive neighbour, Dolphin Blue (Lindsay Duncan), to be a Vampire; that belief isn’t helped […]
A New Leaf (1971) A Romantic Comedy ANYONE can enjoy! (Review)
There is a great joy to be gleaned from the current golden age of boutique home video labels in their discovery of films previously lost to time; enter Masters of Cinema with their release of Elaine May’s A New Leaf. As expressed in the featured video essay, the Bluebeard of […]
Aferim! (2015) Django Unchained being played over images from Meek’s Cutoff (Review)
Since Cristi Puiu’s 2005 breakthrough The Death of Mr Lazarescu, Western European audiences have grown accustomed to seeing a certain kind of film come out of Romania. They came to be known as the Romanian New Wave, and even the most dedicated sceptic of national film movements would have to […]