French language courtroom dramas are having a real moment recently, with 2022 seeing Mati Diop’s masterfully haunting spiritual enigma Saint Omer, then in 2023 we got almost the polar opposite with Justine Triet’s Oscar and Palme D’or-winning marital drama murder-mystery blockbuster (or at least it felt like that in its […]
Reviews
A Man Called Tiger (1973) A Vanity Project that lives up to the Hype? (Review)
In 1970 two former Shaw Brothers executives, Raymond Chow and Leonard Ho, started their own production company – Golden Harvest. While their early films were reasonably successful, it wasn’t until a certain Bruce Lee released The Big Boss that the studio was really put on the map. In a weird […]
Laurel and Hardy: The Silent Years (1927)(Review)
There’s a special joy in watching silent comedy legends before their personalities were fully formed, seeing the gradual snowballing of their characters until we get the iconic figures we know and love. Eureka’s new boxset collects the early works of Laurel and Hardy, chronicling their efforts before they mastered the […]
The Power of the Dog (2021) A Film that gets Under the Skin and Into the Mind (Review)
At the 2022 BAFTA awards, Benedict Cumberbatch had the dubious honour of being nominated, but rather than winning, he instead collected the Best Director award on behalf of Jane Campion for The Power Of The Dog – which would also go on to collect Best Film. It received twelve nominations […]
Lore (2024): An Entertaining Addition to the British Horror Anthology Tradition (Review)
From Dead of Night in 1945 to The House in 2022, anthologies are a familiar, and usually comforting presence in British horror. There’s much that could be, and likely has been, discussed about how this harks back to short stories from British writers like M. R. James and Charles Dickens, […]
Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza (1966) A Melodramatic Yakuza Tragedy (Review)
Radiance Films continue to invest their time and resources into introducing the extraordinary work of Tai Kato to a wider audience. Tokijiro: Lone Yakuza is their fourth release of the under-appreciated genre master. It is staggering to think that this time last year I had never heard of the director […]
Your Lovely Smile (2022) The Artistic Struggle As a Japanese Comedy Drama (Review)
Unless you’ve been to any small-scale Japanese film festivals in recent years (or picked up Third Window Films’ ‘New Directors from Japan’ boxset), you probably haven’t heard of independent film director Hirobumi Watanabe. The inhabitants of Your Lovely Smile by-and-large haven’t heard of him either. Here Watanabe plays himself, in […]
Nothing But The Best (1964) A Blackly Satirical Second Cousin of the Kitchen Sink Movie (Review)
Released on Blu-ray by Studio Canal’s Vintage Classics label this week is Nothing But the Best, a rather undervalued and little seen black comedy from 1964 that stars Alan Bates. An adaptation by Frederic Raphael of a short story by American mystery writer Stanley Ellin, the film is directed by […]
Cadejo Blanco (2021) Twisted Coming of Age Tale set in Gangland Guatemala (Review)
A ‘cadejo’ is a mythic creature in Central American folklore that refers to a dog-like creature that comes in two forms; either the white (blanco) cadejo that protects humans from danger and the black (negro) cadejo that attacks them. This Guatemalan crime drama from American writer/director Justin Lerner clearly posits […]
Hell Hole (2024) There’s Something in the Dirt (Review)
Better known as “fracking”, the process of hydraulic fracturing is, if you’ll pardon the expression, a largely untapped well of horror potential. The controversial fossil-fuel mining technique (outlawed here in the UK since 2019), is infamous for causing environmental damage, pollution, sickness, and even earthquakes – making it a real-life […]