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 […]
Reviews
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 […]
The Prisoner (1955) Alec Guinness’s War of the Words (Review)
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 […]
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 […]