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 […]
Reviews
Fox and his Friends & Chinese Roulette (1975) The many faces of Fassbinder (Review)
Most nations experienced the 1970s as a long, paranoid hangover following the freedom and optimism of the 1960s. But pity poor Germany, which got all of the worst of the 1970s without a ’60s worth talking about. The signature political event of the 1960s in Germany was nothing to do […]
Female Prisoner Scorpion: The Complete Collection (1972)(Review)
More often than not exploitation cinema has laid in the bed it has made, keeping away from art, influence or acclaim. Exploitation is generally an isolated home for those who want to craft transgressive, liberated cinema – qualities that usually lead forwards bad taste. There are always exceptions, films which […]
Men & Chicken (2016) Alienating and repugnant but ever so funny with it (Review)
Scandinavian comedies are perhaps some of the strangest films you’ll ever see, but also magnetic in their charm and quick wit. Whether that would be Stellan Skarsgård as a snow-plough driver going on a killing spree, or a 100-year-old explosive expert escaping from a retirement home for his own adventures […]
Stalker (1979) Tarkovsky’s Infamous & Unfettered Artistic Vision (Review)
Solaris got the remake, Andrei Rublev got the Vatican’s thumbs-up, and Mirror famously caused Lars von Trier to declare Andrei Tarkovsky was God. But the biggest cultural footprint of all the Russian director’s seven feature films undoubtedly belongs to Stalker. His adaptation of Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s novel Roadside Picnic has inspired a […]
Sweet Bean (2015) Naomi Kawase as bolstered by infusions of documentary realism (Review)
DW Griffith once complained that the ‘modern’ Hollywood movie (he was speaking in 1947, though the trend has not reversed since) lacked “the beauty of moving wind in the trees, the little movements in a beautiful flowing of the blossoms”. He might have been impressed by Sweet Bean, the new film […]
The Bloodstained Butterfly (1971) Part Giallo Part Murder Mystery and one for the collectors (Review)
The Giallo is the oddest of beasts – formulaic with a wildly eccentric code at the same time. Ostensibly murder mysteries with penchants for violence and sex, they also played host to some of the most visually inventive names ever to grace Italian cinema. The last thing in the world […]
The Shop on the High Street (1965) a perfume to mask the smell of death (Review)
Viewers for whom the former Czechoslovakia is, in the notorious words of Neville Chamberlain, “a faraway country of which we know little”, might be puzzled by one repeated image in Ján Kádar and Elmar Klos’s 1965 Oscar-winner The Shop on the High Street. It’s a huge pyramid erected by Nazi collaborators, […]
The In-Laws (1979) a pure-bred comedy unicorn (Review)
For all the wonders of the 1970s New Hollywood, it’s not rich in classic comedies. Newly reissued by the Criterion Collection, 1979’s The In-Laws remedies that, while also standing up well against the comedy subgenres and styles of the decades before and after. Its premise – a straight-laced dentist is dragged into […]
Solaris (1972) Full of complex ideas and emotions, must be seen at least once (Review)
Andrei Tarkovsky’s third film, following his chilling debut Ivan’s Childhood and the mammoth Andrei Rublev, Solaris is a film that is more about experience and environment than enjoyment or leisure. Clocking in at 2 hours and 40 minutes, this science-fiction voyage into the human soul is anything but fun and […]