Jauja, in Peru, was once thought to be a Mecca of milk and honey. Thought unreachable by man, something attested to by the number of people who went missing while searching for it. Both the aforementioned geographic and mythical hold weight in Lisandro Alonso’s award-winning film of the same name. This exemplary instance […]
Movies & Documentaries
Man with a Movie Camera (1929) Newly Minted as the Greatest Documentary Ever Made (Review)
Newly enthroned by Sight & Sound as the greatest documentary ever made, Man With a Movie Camera is an easy film to enjoy. Partly this is because of its ripping pace – 67 minutes long, utterly relentless and married here with a Michael Nyman score which matches it gallop for […]
The Beast (1975) Boro’s eye-wateringly animalistic Beauty & the Beast (Review)
Before we turn our attention to the last disc of Arrow’s Blu-Ray Borowczyk restorations, let us take stock of the man’s career up to this point. A shoestring genius of experimental animation, “Boro” had proved his versatility with four massively different features; the crackpot animated comedy of Theatre of Mr. […]
The Face of an Angel (2014) the many faces of a true story adaptation (Review)
Outside traditions of storytelling media, many of the Zeitgeists capturing stories of our time have come from courtrooms. With the Oscar Pistorius case and abuse of civil liberties by now-defunct press outlets to name but two. One which dwarfed those in stature was the long-running Meredith Kercher murder case, forming […]
Immoral Tales (1973) Art, History and Sex Cinema in the hands of Borowczyk (Review)
Since one of the stated aims of Arrow’s Walerian Borowczyk collection has been to rescue his reputation from an association with pornography, it seems strange to say that including two of the late-period erotic films is a masterstroke. And yet it is. Viewed in context, Immoral Tales and its supporting […]
The Voices (2014) Ryan Reynolds wacky Comedy-Horror prelude to Deadpool (Review)
Ryan Reynolds divides opinion just as much he defies expectation. Every time the A-lister gets lost in the mire of leading man-hood, one of his outings as a risk-taker won’t be too far off. He may have cultivated harsh critics over the past five years, but sitting beside that are […]
War and Peace (2002) monumental War Documentary more committed to peace than bloodshed (Review)
War When Mark Cousins started his monthly column in Sight & Sound magazine in 2012, a large chunk of his inaugural piece was spent discussing the work of Anand Patwardhan. Patwardhan is one of those documentarians who the international film festival cognoscenti know and love, yet is almost completely unheard-of […]
Blanche (1971) More Jacobean Tragedy than Euro-Kink Nightmare (Review)
The third film in Arrow’s acclaimed series of Walerian Borowczyk restorations, Blanche is an entry into the late 1960s and early 1970s cycle of Medieval films that produced notable work by Jacques Demy and Pier Paolo Pasolini, before Borowczyk’s disciple Terry Gilliam helped to lovingly spoof it to death with […]
Fuku-Chan of Fuku Fuku Flats (2015) Heartwarming comedy-drama hiding genius casting (Review)
Yosuke Fujita (Quirky Guys and Gals & Fine, Totally Fine), writes and directs his latest film with an enviable simplicity that film is the awkwardly titled Fuku-Chan of Fuku-Fuku Flats. In which the titular Fuku-Chan is a portly 30-something man contented by the simple day-to-day routine of a construction worker […]
Society (1989) The Most Infamous Third Act in 80s Horror (Review)
When visual effects finally caught up with the gory imaginings of horror fans and moviemakers alike, technical advances in animatronics and more practical SFX in liquid and foam latex meant that the human frame could be distorted to an entirely new dimension. Ridley Scott’s Alien paved the way for a […]