It is a bright, sunny day some time in 2014, and Eden Kötting is alive. She is drawing on a transparent sheet with a big black felt tip, and explaining how powerful people are all fools. This simple set-up is the basis for This Illuminated World is Full of Stupid […]
Reviews
All My Good Countrymen (1968) Even a dictatorship can’t keep a lid on this (Review)
A rural, bawdy, political epic with magical realist fringes, full of drinking, singing and close-ups on weathered peasant faces, Vojtěch Jasný’s 1968 film All My Good Countrymen is exactly the sort of thing some people think of when you talk about classic European cinema. Following the fortunes and misfortunes of […]
Song of the Sea (2015) One of the most beautiful animated films we’ve ever seen (Review)
There is a problem in British Cinema and it’s the relationship with its own mythology and history; go to Korea, Japan, Scandinavia or India and you’ll find numerous movies, cartoons, comic books and other paraphernalia devoted to traditional folklore. British Cinema is more captivated by modern history, politics and its […]
The Firemen’s Ball (1967) A good fun satire on totalitarianism? (Review)
If you’re intrigued by the current cinephile chatter about the Czechoslovak New Wave and you’re looking for a good place to start, you couldn’t do much better than Arrow’s new reissue of Miloš Forman’s second film. The Firemen’s Ball is as formally precise and tightly edited as any film in […]
The Ladykillers (1955) Impossibly influential dark comedy caper is still as fresh as a daisy (Review)
Few cinematic institutions rival Ealing Studios; the only similar shadows are cast by British Horror emblem Hammer and the Hong Kong Martial Arts stalwarts, the Shaw Brothers. Between 1930 and 1959, the West London studio bore cinematic fruit that not only stands up to this day, many titles could also […]
Night and the City (1950) Jules Dassin’s Great British Neo-Noir (Review)
Renowned and respected in his own time, but outside of the critical fraternity Jules Dassin is teetering on being forgotten in ours. Between Arrow Films, Eureka and now the BFI, the pinnacle of the UK home video market are doing their very best to bring him back into relevance and to […]
Black Girl/Borom Sarret (1963) Say Hello to the Master of African Cinema (Review)
Black Girl and Borom Sarret, the two films by Ousmane Sembène included on this new BFI release, are historic films. That’s not a value judgement, that’s a statement of fact. A documentary-style account of a day in the life of a troubled wagon driver, Borom Sarret was the first short […]
Zardoz (1974) Much more than James Bond in a Red Nappy (Review)
There aren’t many measures by which Sean Connery’s career could be considered a failure, but he has his Achilles heels, chiefly his self-admitted failure to understand science fiction and fantasy. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a project which persuaded him after nearly half a century of success that this acting […]
3 Women (1977) Stealthing its way into Altman’s canon of classics (Review)
We all know how Robert Altman spent the 1970s, right? M*A*S*H, Nashville, The Long Goodbye, McCabe and Mrs Miller. Freewheeling satirical ensemble pieces, playing fast and loose with genre, inventing the adjective Altmanesque for their naturalistic sprawl. Except there’s another face of Altman’s ’70s work. He was so prolific that […]
Slum-Polis (2015) Intriguing Japanese Apocalypse Drama from Raindance (Review)
In the wake of the Tsunami that hit Japan in 2011, there has been a movement of directors – both high and low profile – who have used that catastrophe to open up a cinematic discourse; one of the more successful examples is Sono’s Land of Hope. Sono formed one […]