The Magdalene Laundries were never really a secret. The official McAleese Report into the institutions claimed that around 11,000 Irish women were held in these institutions after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Aoife Kelleher’s documentary Testimony, released in UK and Irish cinemas this weekend, draws on […]
Movies & Documentaries
The Maiku Hama Trilogy (1994-6) Film Noir through a Vividly Japanese Lens
Anyone mourning the recent cancellation of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face might find a more than acceptable substitute in the form of Third Window Films’s new Blu-Ray release, The Maiku Hama Trilogy. They may be a series of films rather than a television series, but they have exactly the right stand-alone […]
Pocket Money (1976): joyful, humane, ripe for rediscovery
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 […]
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 […]
Preview: The Black Rock (2026) Impressive Micro-Budget WWII Drama
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). […]
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 […]