Regular readers will be familiar with my championing of local filmmaking talent here on Merseyside, from Michael J. Long’s Baby Brother (recently out on wide release to great acclaim), to several films by Jack McLoughlin (who’ll soon be making his television debut with Channel 5’s revival of Play for Today). […]
Movies & Documentaries
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 […]
Daughters of Darkness (1971) Beautiful Euro-Horror with a rich fantastique symbolism
Daughters of Darkness is forever associated with Mark Gatiss’s exceptional 2012 documentary Horror Europa – say what you will about his lacklustre attempts to keep A Ghost Story for Christmas alive. The programmes he made in the early 2010s about the history of cinematic horror are essential viewing for anyone […]
Furious Swords and Fantastic Warriors (1967-83) The Heroic Cinema of Chang Cheh
Run Run Shaw was an entrepreneur. He didn’t see the artistry in cinema, he wanted to make money and lots of it. After monopolising cinema theatres across most of east Asia, primarily in Singapore and Malaysia (under the name Malay Film Productions in the run up to World War II), Run […]
The Florida Project (2017): Reality in the Shadow of a Fantasy
Released on 4K UHD/Blu-ray (limited and standard edition) by Second Sight comes The Florida Project, the 2017 film from Sean Baker – the winner of this year’s Academy Award for Best Director and Best Picture (Anora). Starring Brooklynn Kimberly Prince, Bria Vinaite, and Willem Dafoe, the film has been described […]
Malpertuis (1971) Dreamlike atmospherics and wilful obscurity
Based on Jean Ray’s 1943 novel of the same name and coming to Blu-ray courtesy of Radiance on 13th October, Malpertuis is a bizarre Belgian odyssey from director Harry Kümel. The film had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1972, before subsequently fading from view into cinematic oblivion, […]