There’s an anecdote about Heat and Dust from producer Ismail Merchant in Robert Emmet Long’s 1993 book The Films of Merchant Ivory that I’ve always liked because I think it says a lot about not only the cultural differences between the British film industry and Hollywood but also the different […]
Reviews
One, Two, Three (1961): Billy Wilder’s Satirical Greatest Hits
Mad and hectic, One, Two, Three is a Cold War satire that refuses to be one thing – slow. Here you have all the cast bellowing orders to each other like World War Three is on the horizon, the pacing zips by, and André Previn’s lively score blasts the classic […]
The Song of Bernadette: a film of faith, but not blind faith (Review)
There’s a common lament among certain American Christian bloggers that Hollywood doesn’t make movies with spiritual content like it used to, which to this writer’s eyes does a disservice to interesting modern films about Christianity – The Tree of Life, Silence, First Reformed et al – and also glosses over […]
Blood Hunger: The Films of José Larraz (Review)
The number of bums on cinema seats may be falling and streaming platform’s as numerous as they are unstoppable, with home video falling somewhere between the two. Even so, there will always be a place for DVD and Blu-ray collectors thanks to labels giving boutique releases to the weird, wonderful […]
Stanley, a Man of Variety (2016): Timothy Spall’s surreal comic trip, for better and worse (Review)
It has long been said that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin, and this has never been more true than in the common link of great personal tragedy that can be found in many a quintessentially British comedian from yesteryear. Think about them; Tony Hancock, an […]
Ikarie XB-1 (1963): The best Space & Soap Opera you’ve never seen (Review)
In the 1960s, Soviet and Eastern Bloc sci-fi cinema was full of hope and the promise of a technologically enhanced future. How could it not be? Soviet technology was winning the space race against the decadent West. This may have been due to the West spending millions of dollars in […]
Widows (2018): A tense & intelligent repacking of a 1980s TV classic (Review)
Growing up as I did in the 1980s, I well remember the original Widows – Lynda La Plante’s 1983 miniseries about four women who have no option but to follow in the footsteps of their late husbands and partners and into a life of crime. It starred Ann Mitchell (now […]
Death in Venice (1971): Luchino Visconti makes a good film, but a bad adaptation (Review)
A few years before the First World War, the renowned composer Gustav von Aschenbach suffers a serious health scare. He is ordered to take complete rest, so he decides to travel to Venice for an extended holiday. Staying at a high-class hotel, he notices a Polish family there. The children […]
Sister Street Fighter (1974): Stealth Feminist Exploitation Icon? (Review)
Shinichi Chiba (Sonny) became a star in the global kung fu fever inspired by Bruce Lee and the international success of his unfortunate swansong, Enter the Dragon. Like many of his Hong Kong peers, Chiba starred in an awful lot of movies and not many of them good – however, […]
Ugetsu (1953) Mizoguchi, Japan’s most elusive master director (Review)
For all that Kenji Mizoguchi tends to be introduced as one of Japan’s post-war triumvirate of great filmmakers, along with his younger contemporaries Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, the evidence for such claims has been poorly distributed. This is partly due to the majority of the prolific director’s films being […]