Say “Jean-Pierre Mocky” to even the most avid of French film fans on this side of the channel and you’re likely to receive little more than a shrug, but the iconoclastic writer/director/actor/cinema owner was a cult figure in his homeland, winning praise from no less than Jean-Luc Godard over a […]
Movies & Documentaries
Kinds of Kindness (2024) A Sandbox for Dramatic Discovery and Play (Review)
With Kinds of Kindness, mild-mannered Greek enfant terrible Yorgos Lanthimos has finally returned home to his long-time writing partner Efthimis Filippou (Dogtooth, The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer) after an extended vacation with screenwriter Tony McNamara (The Favourite, Poor Things). Or perhaps this is the vacation. With a […]
Rose (2022): Sofie Gråbøl Shines in this Study of Schizophrenia (Review)
Made in 2022, the Danish film Rose has finally made its long-anticipated way to our shores, becoming available in select cinemas and on demand from Friday, June 28th. The popularity of Danish or Scandinavian film and television has risen in recent years, thanks to their many crime dramas that continue […]
The Dead Don’t Hurt (2023) Classic Western Fare with a Wistful Edge (Review)
To paraphrase Bob Marley: “who shot the western?” There are a number of smoking guns when it comes to this particular murder. Was it Michael Cimino, the megalomaniacal visionary behind Heaven’s Gate, an epic so wildly out of control that it killed an entire film studio? Was it the audience […]
Poolman (2023): it’s not Chris Pine’s The Big Lebowski, but it’s not bad either (Review)
The first thing we hear is the distant barking of dogs, and the wolves have certainly been out for Chris Pine’s directorial debut since it premiered at the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Before the event began, the idea of Best Chris giving his variant on the Dude archetype in […]
The Miracle Fighters (1982) Lost Under the Weight of Yuen Woo Ping’s Many Classics (Review)
Yuen Woo Ping. One of the few names that has transcended the films he worked on and become synonymous with top quality fights. Thanks to his work on films such as The Matrix, Kill Bill and arguably the one that put his name on the global cinematic map, Crouching Tiger, […]
Bandits of Orgosolo + The Lost World (1961) Radiance’s Best Release Yet (Review)
I reliably watch around 300 films every year. I am set to fall a long way short of that in 2024. Over the last two months, I’ve found it hard to concentrate as I focused my energy on preparing to move out of my damp flat while chronically ill, opting […]
Gonjiam Haunted Asylum (2018) Old School Haunted House Terror from Korea (Review)
Korean Horror is a little known entity outside of the TV format, and even though, like Japan, it has a reductive abbreviation to pack all of its horrors together in a digestible sub-genre (K-Horror), there’s no poster child, no Ringu, Cure, or Dark Water level threat. You could cite the […]
The Sacrament (2013) Ti West’s true-story Exploitation goes South (Review)
No one does genre pastiche quite like Ti West who, after working his way up from no-budget shorts to no-budget features, finally took off in 2009 with the one-two hits of a ready-made cult classic (House of the Devil), and a straight-to-video sequel (Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever). There’s an […]
The G (2023): lean, realist revenge thriller puts a welcome spotlight on Dale Dickey (Review)
The concept of “geriaction” has been around for a fair while, although not long enough for people to give it a better name. Younger audiences born around the time Liam Neeson made his first Taken movie in 2008 might be forgiven for assuming older leads are just a thing action […]