Raymond Bernard’s 1932 film, Wooden Crosses is a key title in the history of the war film. From a personal perspective, its classification as such is a source of debate; historically, important films can have legendary status by being very modern in their construct, visual potency as well as by […]
Movies & Documentaries
Traps (1998) Rape Revenge Black Comedy as channelled through Czech subversion (Review)
The Czech director Věra Chytilová is best known internationally for her 1966 film Daisies, a ferocious, antic and relentlessly original comedy about two young women carrying out a Dadaist rebellion against the staidness of Czechoslovakian society. Although Daisies seems to become more and more acclaimed as a classic with each […]
Pictures of the Old World (1972) Sorrowful, Funny and Bawdy portrait of a people (Review)
When Czechoslovakia divided into two nations in 1993, cinema fans could be forgiven for thinking the new Czech Republic had hoarded the family silver. So many of the former nation’s finest directors – Věra Chytilová, Miloš Forman, Jiří Menzel, Jan Švankmajer – were Czech, so there’s a thrill of discovery […]
Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter (2015) Sobering portrait of Japanese loneliness (Review)
Takako Konishi was an office worker from Tokyo who was found dead in Minnesota and became the muse behind the urban legend that the Coen Brothers Fargo is the key to a lost bounty of cash. That same Urban Legend is the key inspiration behind David Zellner’s third film Kumiko […]
The Turning (2015) Eclectic Aussie Shorts based on the work of Tim Winton (Review)
It’s a common lament among booksellers that you just can’t get people interested in short story collections, which is a shame considering writers as diverse as HP Lovecraft, E Annie Proulx, Angela Carter, Eileen Chang and Jorge Luis Borges have produced their finest works in this form. So it’s to […]
Back to 1942 (2012) Come and See China in this gruelling war drama (Review)
The BFI has had many seasons dedicated to many national cinemas, directors, epochs or movements, with their status they have also brought many old science fiction programmes, documentaries or, as is currently the case, Chinese films into a focus they couldn’t enjoy otherwise. Today they have released two home video […]
The Last of the Unjust (2013): Shoah director still throws up genuine moral challenges (Review)
Claude Lanzmann’s complex, heavyweight and incredibly powerful new film The Last of the Unjust is a feature-length reworking of material gathered over the arduous twelve-year shoot for his defining work Shoah. It is an interview with Benjamin Murmelstein, a Viennese rabbi appointed by the Nazis as “Elder” of Theresienstadt, the […]
The Other (1972) Subsequent scary kid horror movies have stolen all its best tricks (Review)
Horror is an incredibly cyclical beast; the current cycle is a mix between the perpetual zombie and haunted house films. One of the more pre-eminent historical cycles is the bad seed, or to give it a more common name – scary kids. The 1960s and 70s saw the zenith with […]
Shanghai 13 (1984): Lesser late-era from the master filmmaker, Chang Cheh (Review)
For UK home video aficionado’s two labels exemplified martial arts and Asian cinema, Tartan and Hong Kong Legends, both of whom now cease to be. Third Window and a band of small independents have taken some of the slack for Tartan’s demise, but for martial arts cinema, the only outlet […]
Kinetta (2005) Yorgos Lanthimos before he started weirding the world out (Review)
Yorgos Lanthimos’s films have the feel – though not the visual style – of watching CCTV footage of a rowdy Saturday night. You are always aware that terrible violence could erupt at any moment, but you don’t know when, and it’s all you can do to watch in a state […]