Howard Hawks once told Ernest Hemingway that he could make a film out of his worst novel. He told him this whilst they were on a fishing trip together, and for the remainder of the trip they worked on the screenplay together. Despite Hemingway himself working on the script, the […]
Movies & Documentaries
Umberto D (1952) I’m Not Crying OK? It’s Just Something In My Eye (Review)
Released to Criterion this week is Umberto D., Vittorio De Sica’s classic film about a pensioner who struggles to make ends meet in an economically-ravaged Italy in the post-war years. A retired civil servant, the ageing Umberto is determined to keep his dignity as he navigates a series of challenges […]
Desire (1958)/All My Good Countrymen (1968); Two Films by Vojtěch Jasný (Review)
Second Run are really spoiling us this week. This two-disc release may claim to be ‘Two films by Vojtěch Jasný, but it is in fact four; alongside the main features, 1958’s Desire (Touha, in its native Czech) and All My Good Countrymen (aka Všichni dobří rodáci) from a decade later, […]
The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974) Giallo, from the outside-in (Blu-Ray Review)
One of my favourite novels is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It’s a dark thriller where a group of ten guests are invited to a mysterious island, and then picked off one by one, as they realise the killer must be among them. When I heard that The […]
Memoria (2021): An Elegy For the Future (Blu-ray Review)
The American distribution by Neon of Memoria attempted to create a never-ending release whereby it would play at a single cinema for one night only and then move on to another one. At the time of writing, this process is still more or less in place, but evidently, the pandemic […]
Nitram (2021) The psychological dread of the unseen and “powerless” (VOD review)
Justin Kurzel is a filmmaker who understands dread and how to instil this feeling in his audience. Across his oeuvre, Kurzel has consistently created environments and narratives that create a sense of dread through intimate framing that bring the viewer queasily close, familiar spaces where horrific events occur and performances […]
The Deer King (2021) Too many characters fail to spoil this sumptuous anime (Cinema Review)
Once upon a time the name Production IG carried a certain gravitas. With works such as the 1995 film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, the eerily seductive Blood: The Last Vampire and later to be recognised by the great Hollywood machine in the form of Quentin Tarantino (who requested […]
Summertime (1955): David Lean’s favourite David Lean film (Blu-Ray Review)
Asked to name a David Lean film, most people would plump for Lawrence of Arabia or The Bridge on the River Kwai before they mentioned Summertime. Yet this holiday romance was Lean’s favourite of his own movies, and Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray suggests plenty of reasons why. Before he became […]
Universal Terror: A Collection of Comforting Karloff Cinema (1937/1944/1952)(Blu-ray Review)
It cannot be overstated how much Boris Karloff’s performance in Frankenstein deserves its iconic status. The physicality and emotional expressiveness he brings to the Monster still have emotional resonance and rightly made Karloff a star. However, he had already been acting for over a decade by this point and Frankenstein […]
Larks on a String (1969): saved from the scrapheap of censorship (Review)
Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String, released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Second Run, won the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlin International Film Festival – an impressive feat for any film, but a remarkable one when you consider Menzel’s film was twenty-one years old at that point. […]