Whether Slovak, Hungarian or South East Asian, a country’s cinematic output requires a degree of cultural and historical context; add (the) former Czechoslovakia, and you have the cross-section that makes up the DNA of Second Run’s remit. Nuances naturally occur, but the consistencies in these nations are modern histories demarcated […]
Reviews
Carmen Jones (1954) Influential Black Musical with a weird relationship to race (Review)
Your reviewer can sometimes be guilty of dancing around the less quantifiable aspects of enjoying a movie, so let’s talk about star presence. As soon as she appears on screen in Otto Preminger’s 1950 musical – reissued for the first time on Blu-Ray by the BFI – Dorothy Dandridge has […]
The Secret of Santa Vittoria (1969) A beautifully photographed diamond in the rough (Review)
Two years after he dropped the critically lauded Sidney Poitier picture, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? Stanley Kramer flew over to Italy to begin what-would-be his next big feature, an adaptation of Robert Crichton’s first novel, The Secret of Santa Vittoria. Kramer, the acclaimed director behind the courtroom drama, Judgement […]
Psychomania (1973) Black Magic, Low Budgets and glorious British camp (Review)
Rational thought is the last thing in the world you should bring to B-movies, so much so it’ll be difficult to even pass the title card of Psychomania – the latest release on BFI’s wonderful Flipside brand – before the hokum hits the fan. Don Sharp (Rasputin, the Mad Monk) […]
Tartuffe (1925) Dynamic, daring and full of beautiful compositions, it’s definitely more than lesser Murnau (Review)
In Jean-Pierre Melville’s debut film The Silence of the Sea, Howard Vernon’s tragically naive Nazi lieutenant tries to curry favour with the French family he’s staying with by praising their culture. He says his Fatherland has but one emblematic literary genius, Goethe, but France is spoiled for choice with Zola, […]
Cat People (1942) one of the most singular, groundbreaking horror movies in American history (Review)
After the debut film by their golden boy Orson Welles underperformed at the box office, RKO Studios decided to refocus their efforts on commercial genre work. They decided to create a new “horror unit” to make inexpensive frighteners and put Val Lewton, a former employee of legendary producer David O […]
Nostalgia (1983) Diving into Tarkovsky’s Deep End (Review)
Curzon Artificial Eye releases the penultimate film from Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography in Nostalgia. Post-Stalker, Tarkovsky planned to make “The First Day” – a film that would interrogate atheism in the Soviet Union. Long story short. He had a major confrontation with Goskino (USSR committee for cinematography) whereby the half-finished film […]
The Glass Key (1942) & The Veronica Lake Show (Review)
In his 1970 essay Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir, Raymond Durgnat suggests that the genre’s most common topics developed as a method of plausible deniability. As the Red Scare hotted up, left-leaning directors could address corruption in, say, prisons or boxing and have it stand as a microcosm […]
The Human Condition (1959) a must-see for any fan of world cinema (Review)
WWII is a frequently used setting throughout the course of cinema history. No matter what, every critically acclaimed filmmaker must have at least one film set in-between the time period of 1939 – 1945. Steven Spielberg presented the horrors of the Holocaust in unflinching black-and-white realism in Schlinder’s List. Wolfgang […]
Hiroshi Inagaki – The Samurai Trilogy (1955-56) Not Quite Samurai Classics (Review)
History is dense with folk icons; men and women whose stories have translated with great success to the cinema with the Wong Fei Hung’s and Spartacus’s of the world over-represented. Here in Britain, we tend to treat our historical figures with the wrong side of a sharp blade, abandoning them […]