Some directors are primarily famous for one scene, and in the case of Kazuo Hara it’s easy to pinpoint which one it is. Hara’s 1987 documentary The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On is notorious for a moment in which the film’s subject Kenzo Okuzaki, a Japanese World War II veteran […]
Reviews
Salem’s Lot (1979): A Masterclass in Slow-Burn Horror
Strange things are happening in Jerusalem’s Lot – the residents are turning into vampires! Salem’s Lot (1979) is a two-part miniseries based on the 1975 Stephen King novel of the same name, following author Ben Mears (David Soul), who returns to his hometown to write about the mysterious Marsten House, […]
New Directors from Japan: Takashi Ono (2016-2023)
Every now and then you see a film where the only viable response is: where did that come from? The beauty of Third Window’s new Takashi Ono collection is that it answers that question. As collections go, it’s modestly-scaled stuff; three shorts and a feature, and the feature’s only just […]
Knights of the Teutonic Order (1960): most super of the Polish “super productions”
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 […]
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 […]