On paper, Albert Brooks’s Modern Romance sounds like a trivial, run-of-the-mill romantic comedy following a film editor trying to fix his relationship with his former girlfriend. In execution though, Brooks understands that clichéd plotting won’t get him anywhere in his second directorial effort. Brooks’s Modern Romance is a dryly funny […]
Reviews
Girl With Green Eyes (1964) One for fans of the pleasingly old-fashioned Brooklyn (Review)
When we think of Woodfall films we invariably think of the drama genre, unique to the British film industry, known as ‘kitchen sink’. After all, it was a genre they had certainly made their name off the back of, with an impressive track record straight from the traps; Look Back […]
A Ciambra (2017) Neo-Italian Social Neo-Realism fails to recapture the magic of the masters (Review)
A spectre is haunting cinema— the spectre of Italian neorealism. Spectral, because despite the critical and cultural ripples made by films like The Florida Project, American Honey, and Valeska Grisebach’s Western, these non-professional actors, semi-real situations and hitherto unexplored settings tend to be forgotten by awards season. The genre, which […]
Iron Monkey (1993) One of the best entry points of Kung-Fu Cinema (Review)
If DVDs wore out as VHS did, my old Hong Kong Legends Iron Monkey DVD would’ve been degraded to the degree that it’d probably play more like a bootleg than a legit release. Everyone has movies like that, movies where you know you want to watch something but you don’t […]
Look Back in Anger (1959) the film that helped establish British kitchen-sink realism (Review)
When I was a kid, the Liverpudlian comedian Mick Miller used to tell a joke I still regard fondly to this day. He’d stand on stage before the microphone and say “And now, name that film”. He’d then turn his back to the audience and, looking over his shoulder at […]
Jubilee (1978) Pure Punk and Pure Derek Jarman (Review)
And so time marches on, stopping only to produce ironies. Derek Jarman’s Jubilee, its very title a sarcastic reference to Queen Elizabeth II’s twenty-five years in office, is reissued by the BFI on dual format for its own ruby anniversary. The disc is released a week or so after the […]
The Defiant Ones (1958) one of the most crushing, pessimistic examples of the Hays Code in action (Review)
This summer, you might have already seen two very different people, chained together, forced to co-operate in order to escape their captivity. They even climbed out of a mud-pit; if you weren’t thinking about The Defiant Ones (about two chain-gang prisoners, one white and one black, in a similar mess) […]
The Mercy (2017) James Marsh delivers arguably his finest fictional narrative cinematic feature yet (Review)
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race; the first single-handed, round the world (with no stops) yacht race. The race remains deeply controversial as only one yachtsman managed to finish and another, the failing businessman and amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst, encountered so many difficulties […]
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) The Antidote to Biopic Fatigue (Review)
An extraordinary film even by the standards of Criterion’s UK catalogue, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is your go-to film to counter accusations that biopics are inherently stuffy, stylistically conservative Oscar-bait. And it’s all thanks to Hank Williams. After surviving the excesses of the ’70s New Hollywood, […]
Loveless (2017) A Russian apocalyse within a dissolving marriage (Review)
Russian cinema is certainly one for its figureheads. Sergei Eisenstein was instrumental in many theories that would go on to establish the cinematic language. Andrei Tarkovsky established and nigh on perfected the arthouse. And since his passing there wasn’t really much of a centrepiece for Russian cinema, as such, it […]