For a company that’s over twenty years old, Second Run are finding a gratifying number of new strings to their bow. The largely untapped seams of world cinema they’ve been exploring recently include Indian independent films like The Circus Tent, Manthan and Ishanou, all of which reveal a very different […]
Reviews
Underworld Chronicles (1996-2002) Three Films, One Filmmaker, Zero Rules – Takashi Miike
Takashi Miike is a rogue whose legend has long been cemented in cinema lore. He has directed 127 features and TV shows at the time of writing, six of which came from his legendary 2001 run. He makes a mockery of auteur theory because every other film feels like the […]
Hard Boiled 4K (1992) Where John Woo pushed action cinema to its extreme
90s American action cinema was running out of road. The superstars who defined the 1980s – Jean-Claude Van Damme, Steven Seagal, Dolph Lundgren, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone – were still motoring along, but the downward trajectory was obvious. Straight-to-DVD purgatory, drastic reinvention or retirement awaited most of them. A few […]
Long Live the Republic! (1965): World War II through the eyes of a Czech Fellini
Karel Kachyňa can be a hard director to pin down, which is probably for the best considering that, for a lot of his career, Czechoslovakia’s intelligence agencies were trying to do just that. Like a surprising amount of the country’s best directors, he did not flee after the Soviet invasion […]
Redoubt (2026) Turning Video Art Into A Visually Compelling Feature
What film could be more appropriate to release in 2026 than a man building a fortified shelter in case of war? The topical irony of John Skoog’s narrative feature debut Redoubt was certainly not lost on me from the moment the film opens. A pamphlet showing what to do in […]
Haunters of the Silence (2025) A lo‑fi plunge into the uncanny space between dreaming and waking
When I was very young I used to experience nightmares where I felt as though I had “woken up” in my bed, but was still at the mercy of whatever dreamt-up horrors might lurk beyond the wall of sleep. Given how young I was at the time, as well as […]
Excalibur (1981) Boorman’s bold, mystical retelling of Arthurian legend
John Boorman’s Excalibur (1981) is an adaptation of one of the more well known stories of western mythology. There have been countless versions of the tale of King Arthur and his knights, but Excalibur remains one of if not the best one. My only other experience with a Boorman film […]
The Devil’s Hand (1943): A dark wartime parable
When France was occupied by Nazi Germany from 1940 to 1944 all aspects of life were affected, and cinema was no exception as the Germans set up Continental Films to provide the French populace with an escape from the horrors of real life. Most of films made were harmless escapism, […]
Dead Lover (2026): An Unhinged and Colourful Take on Frankenstein
Grace Glowicki and Ben Petrie are proving to be the horror power couple of 2026 after starring in Dead Lover and Honey Bunch, both of which were released this year after a successful tour of the festival circuit. Although both films use the horror genre to explore the demands of […]
Cutter’s Way (1981): Passer, paranoia and the *other* great Vietnam-vet vigilante movie
Asked about the ambiguous plot of his 1976 neo-noir Night Moves, Arthur Penn shrugged “We’re part of a generation that knows there are no solutions”. He didn’t reveal what was on his mind, but it’s pretty easy to guess. The generation who grew up in the 1960s and 70s were […]