For my money, Alec Guinness is one of the greatest British character actors of all time. No matter if he was playing the buck-toothed Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers, or the wise and mysterious Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, Guinness always brought elegance, wit, and charm to his performances. Rewind […]
Reviews
Kolobos (1999) soft satire, but hard gore (Review)
Let’s spin back to summer, 1999; Big Brother launches in the Netherlands, the public is slowly becoming acclimatised to words like “webcam” and “JPEG”, and the two big horror talking points – Ringu and The Blair Witch Project – take the genre’s regular voyeuristic concerns into an age where VHS […]
Ray & Liz (2018) Trading Memories of a Working-Class North (Review)
The Black Country born photographer and artist Richard Billingham first came to fame in the mid to late 1990s, when his award-winning photographic collection of his working-class parents formed part of Charles Saatchi’s YBA exhibition, ‘Sensation’. At the height of what was known as ‘Cool Britannia’, Billingham’s uncompromising look to the […]
Possum (2018) a bleakness from beyond the dark place (Review)
Part [The] Babadook and part David Lynch fuelled nightmare, Matthew Holness’s directorial debut, Possum, is as bleak and oppressive as psychological horror gets. Unfortunately, I get the impression that Holness would’ve been better suited turning Possum into a portmanteau film rather than a feature of its own. And that’s fine, […]
Sink the Bismarck! (1960) A British Stiff-Upper Lip Vision of Heroism (Review)
Directed by Lewis Gilbert, the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! tells the true-life story of the Royal Navy’s mission to track down and destroy the eponymous pride of the German fleet and scourge of Atlantic shipping. Making it’s UK Blu-ray debut on the Eureka Classics label, it’s a distinctive film […]
The Boys In The Band (1970) After Stonewall, Before Pride (Review)
He may be associated with the tough, transgressive American cinema of the 1970s, but there’s a part of William Friedkin that would have made a first-rate Old Hollywood journeyman. Peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader have recently been making personal, self-penned projects, but Friedkin’s 21st-century career renaissance came […]
Ring (1998) The Most Important J-Horror For Good Reason (Review)
Hideo Nakata’s Ring is famously the film that triggered the western world’s awareness that yes, Asian countries do make horror films. It also famously triggered a slew of sequels and remakes, from the Korean The Ring Virus to the recent American Rings. It’s undeniably important in horror cinema, but being […]
Parents (1989) Anti-Cannibal Comedy-Horror via John Waters & David Lynch (Review)
In 2019, Bob Balaban’s known for his roles in Wes Anderson’s films (most prominently as the narrator in Moonrise Kingdom), his acting has also seen him work with the likes of Spielberg, Altman, Ken Russell, and Christopher Guest. He has also carved out a side career as a director, only […]
The Unholy (1988) The Fine Line Between Religious Horror And Satanic Panic (Review)
Many things came to mind when I watched this new Vestron video release, the Unholy. Horror is thought of as a safe place for outsiders. Mostly that is true but if you dig deeper into the subtext you’ll find that isn’t really all that accurate a truism. Slashers, for example, […]
Shoah The Four Sisters (2018) Chamber Pieces From A Historical Nightmare (Review)
Even before his death in July 2018, Claude Lanzmann was always easier to imagine in retrospect. He remained a public figure into his nineties, and a valuable one at that: thoughtful, eloquent, combative when necessary. His work, though, was dominated by two time periods. The first was the period from […]