François Truffaut’s empathy for, and skill at directing, children stretches all the way back to his first feature The 400 Blows, which launched the career of Jean-Pierre Leaud and is frequently cited as one of the all-time great directorial debuts. Pocket Money, released on Blu-Ray by Radiance Films, is rarely […]
Movies & Documentaries
Shelby Oaks (2024) Chris Stuckmann’s Confident If Cluttered Directorial Debut
Watching Shelby Oaks in cinemas was a far more cathartic experience personally than previously anticipated. Chris Stuckmann is, in my humble opinion, the best movie critic to come out of YouTube throughout the 2010s. He’s always been more critically-minded than Jeremy Jahns (no disrespect to him, who I also watch […]
Boorman and the Devil (Imagine Film Fest 2025): Exorcising a Much-Maligned Sequel
From 30th October to the 9th November, Imagine Film Festival invites you to reconsider John Boorman’s much maligned horror sequel to 1973’s record-breaking success The Exorcist – the ill-fated film Exorcist II: The Heretic (1977). William Friedkin, who directed the original, held nothing back in his verdict of Boorman’s film, […]
Mag Mag (Imagine Film Festival 2025)
While self-explanatory, a director only gets to debut once, so they better make it count. A note that the popular Japanese comedian Yuriyan Retriever took in her stride with her first feature film, Mag Mag, which played at 2025’s Imagine Film Festival in Amsterdam (and Frightfest’s 2025 Halloween event, too). […]
Incomplete Chairs (Grimmfest 2025): The Serial Killer / Furniture Builder Film We Never Knew We Needed
Ken’ichi Ugana returns to Grimmfest, after the showing of Love Will Tear Us Apart in 2023, with Incomplete Chairs further showcasing his imaginative storytelling. His latest is more akin to another of his films currently playing festivals this year, The Curse, in leaning more into outright horror than comedy. Incomplete Chairs opens with Shinsuke Kujo (Ryu Ichinose) […]
Frankenstein (2025) Visually Dazzling and Emotionally invested take on a Literary Legend
Although Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was certainly something I was looking forward to, I’m also not blind to the inherent fear that yet another director would finally deliver their long-gestating big-budget passion project, and find it completely underwhelming. Large-scale passion projects seem to have a tendency to go wrong. Infamously, […]
Kontinental ’25 (2025) Hard-to-swallow satire from Romania’s smartest joker
Romanian satirist and experimental filmmaking punk rocker Radu Jude told us to not expect too much from the end of the world in, well, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, an epic farce of an essay about what it means to barely get by off the […]
Manthan (1976): the birth of crowd-funding?
After The Circus Tent and Ishanou, Second Run once again partners with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation for another restoration of a classic Indian film made outside the country’s mainstream industry. Few further outside, I reckon, than Shyam Benegal’s Manthan. Benegal had made a couple of documentaries about Operation […]
Altered States (1980): Ken Russell’s primeval Hollywood trip
There’s a lovely extra on this Criterion 4K disc of Ken Russell’s Altered States. It sees the director appearing on a very leisurely chat show where the host is taken aback at how nice and softly-spoken the director of such notorious cinematic provocations as The Devils, Women in Love and […]
The Diabolical Dr Z (1966) Jess Franco before he became the King of Spanish Sleaze
Jesús “Jess” Franco was God’s favourite pervert. If Mario Bava was the father of European gothic cinema, then Franco is its weird uncle – a title I bestow upon him out of love and appreciation, of course. According to IMDb, the Spanish genre filmmaker directed a whopping 199 feature films […]