Film noir’s spiritual home has always been the streets. With The Naked City, though, Jules Dassin made that spiritual home into a literal home. Previous films had cooked up bustling metropolitan locations on Hollywood sound-stages, but Dassin’s film was the first film to take advantage of the new lightweight cameras […]
Reviews
The Frightened City (1961) Connery on the Cusp (Review)
Released to StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics Collection this week, The Frightened City is a 1961 British noir from Canadian-born director John Lemont about protection rackets in London’s West End. It’s a solid, if fairly unremarkable gangland thriller, one which would perhaps be lost to the mists of time were it not […]
Death Has Blue Eyes (1975) Skittish Greek Misadventures with the Lads (Review)
Greece isn’t exactly at the top of world cinema exporters – however, two names that have any cultural cache are Yorgos Lanthimos and the late Theo Angelopoulos. Even with that being the case, the country still managed to produce one of the nastier examples of 1970s horror, Nico Mastorakis’s Island […]
The Bloodhound (2020) Somewhere between David Lynch and Yorgos Lanthimos (Review)
Classic Film Kid: The Invisible Man Appears (1949)(Review)
Two Martial Arts Films: Russian Raid (2020) & Winners and Sinners (1983)
I Was at Home, But… (2019) A Reserved, Existentialist Euro-Drama (Review)
Existentialism is often considered a crisis. When an individual thinks about their life and it’s meaning, impossible questions are posed. It is a common recurrence for those, like me, who have no idea what they are doing with themselves, their lives or their emotions. I Was at Home, But… the award-winning film […]
Lost in America (1985): some kind of comic masterpiece (Review)
Kagemusha (1980) Kurosawa, the master visual story-teller (Blu-ray Review)
74 years old Akira Kurosawa was when he directed Kagemusha. And, funnily enough, the 1970s weren’t a kind decade to the master director with the highest-profile film, of the three he produced that decade, being the marginal Serbian Adventure Movie, Dersu Uzala. A point stressed in the extras of this […]
The Columnist (2020) A Shrewdly Clever Dark Comedy Horror for the Online Age (Review)
I won’t go as far as calling the internet a mistake as it has opened up dialogue, culture and opportunities that never would’ve been available otherwise. We certainly wouldn’t exist without the internet. That being said, the advent of social media has provided ample opportunity to those with the most […]