Fritz Lang needs no introduction. For my money, he was a giant of cinema, on par with Alfred Hitchcock for that matter. And you needn’t look far for proof, the Weimar Republic era of Lang’s work is perhaps one of the finest runs in a director’s career, from Destiny to […]
Reviews
How I Won the War: much more than just Beatles trivia (Review)
Louis Malle’s advice for directors trying to make films overseas was to start with a genre piece; he’d began his American career with the tough social drama Pretty Baby, and he later wondered if he should have instead done something in a less realist register, where people would forgive the […]
The World is Yours: Scarface via Drunken Hell Holiday islands (Review)
Farès is a small-time drug dealer in France, with little enthusiasm to continue. He’s been trying to become a legitimate businessman, with the idea of setting up a company exporting freeze pops to North Africa. His chance has finally come, and he’s saved up 80,000 Euros for the opportunity… 80,000 […]
The Big Clock: Charles Laughton powered noir (Review)
A good extra can take your appreciation of a movie to a whole new level. On Arrow Academy’s newly issued [the] Big Clock, Simon Callow has done just that with his video appreciation of Charles Laughton’s performance as the despotic magazine magnate, Janoth. Callow goes on to say that this […]
Black Moon Rising (1986) John Carpenter albeit minus the craft (Review)
Troy Howarth in his visual essay, Carpenter’s Craft, talks about how John Carpenter shopped around spec scripts he had written in order to start one of the most beloved of all late 20th century runs. One of those was Arrow Video’s Black Moon Rising. That opening says everything that needs […]
A Face in the Crowd: The American nightmare, years ahead of its time (Review)
An American television institution from the days before American sitcoms was the backbone of Channel Four, most Britons will be familiar with The Andy Griffith Show through its cultural after-effects, rather than the show itself. This writer first heard of it via the distorting mirror of ‘Floyd the Barber’, the […]
Breaking the Limits: Punkish Polish biopic (Review)
Those paying attention to the British box office top ten will have noticed something unexpected creeping in over the last few years, a hardy microflora springing up in between the usual mix of franchises by Disney and franchises by studios bought out by Disney. For the first time since the […]
The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot: 21st-century tall tales (Review)
Normally when a film’s auteur identity is ascribed to a producer it’s because said producer is a major Hollywood player. We know what a Jerry Bruckheimer film looks like, as surely as previous generations knew what a David O Selznick film looks like. In the independent realm, the director is […]
Shakespeare Wallah: Merchant Ivory Opulence missing a certain something (Review)
Made in 1965, Shakespeare Wallah was the second collaboration from Merchant Ivory and the first to really garner some international attention. Written by regular Merchant Ivory scribe Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the film was one of the earliest English-language speaking roles for acclaimed Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor and marked the screen […]
Dragged Across Concrete: a tense thriller, a hard pill to swallow (Review)
S. Craig Zahler has been a director who I have been banging the drum for since adoring his hybrid horror-western, Bone Tomahawk. Zahler’s hard-knuckled follow-up, Brawl in Cell Block 99, also landed in my Best of the Year list for 2017. As for Zahler’s third outing as director and writer, […]