Emotional neglect is a significant problem in Asia, proven how suicide has inflated to epidemic levels on more than one occasion. With cinema reflecting the world we live it, emotional neglect, isolation and despair have gone on to become prevalent subtexts and thematic discourse within much of Asian cinema. So […]
Movies & Documentaries
I’m All Right Jack (1959): The cinema beginnings of a comedy titan (Review)
2014’s box office saw the Lego Movie gain the most money, jumping back, with Studio Canal’s latest release, to 1959 and it shows just how much the cinema landscape has changed. The biggest hit of 1959 in I’m all right Jack has concerns that are just as prevalent today as […]
The Promised Land (1974): Fierce Polish Classic about as Anti-Capitalist as they come (Review)
Andrzej Wajda’s The Promised Land, based on the 1898 novel by Władysław Reymont, takes place at the peak of the industrial revolution and proceeds to vilify the crude beginnings of capitalism. Introduced into this fierce satire are three young friends, a Pole, a Jew and a German who pool their […]
The Day the Earth Caught Fire (1961): perfectly pitched 1960s British apocalypse movie (Review)
Given the recent unseasonably warm spell and the continuing discourse on global Warming, Val Guest’s 1961 sci-fi drama The Day the Earth caught fire takes on an eerily prescient quality. First Guest and Wolf Mankowitz’s London suffers an unseasonably warm spell, then cripplingly thick heat fog which segued its way […]
Blacula (1972) Dracula as the complete article of Black Horror (Review)
Blaxploitation habitually made itself a wide-open target for parody and mockery, take the newly released Blacula directed by William Crain, it sounds like a joke rather than something conceived from a creative mind with a status quo to challenge. Even the trailer made at the time of release called Blacula, […]
Youth of the Beast (1963): Seijun Suzuki for the masses (Review)
Yojimbo has got an awful lot of mileage on the clock what with it being remade and reinterpreted the world over. Whether that’s with Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars or the closer to home output with Japanese New Wave Wunderkind Seijun Suzuki and Youth of the Beast. The latter […]
Sofia’s Last Ambulance (2012): the perfect antidote to evening TV (Review)
The documentary format where a TV crew follow a public servant, chronicling their professions ins and outs has become supremely trite over the last decade, the BBC are the prime offenders with this. Like the game show, with each new one popping up it becomes as clear as day that […]
Lesson of Evil (2011) Takashi Miike returns to his controversial roots (Review)
Between his flirtation with every genre under the sun and his prolific nature, there is absolutely no else in the world like Takashi Miike. For a while now, he has been maturing as a director, seeking more than the exploitation films he made his name with, the apex of which […]
The Visitor (1979) Five movies glued together in an act of rebellious, surreal madness (Review)
Usually, when the credits roll, you’ll have a fair idea what you thought of a film, maybe it’ll take a while to settle but the basis of an opinion is there. Sometimes, though, sometimes an opinion is as far away as the horizon. Sometimes you have to talk it out […]
A Farewell to Arms (1932) World War I movie or classical melodrama romance? (Review)
The Dukes Theatre in Lancaster recently had a run from progressive multimedia Theatre Company imitating the dog that adapted Ernest Hemingway’s anti-war novel A Farewell to Arms. During the same window, BFI issued a Blu-ray/DVD release of Frank Borzage’s 1932 Oscar-winning film (Best Cinematography and Sound) adaptation of the classic […]