Louis Malle’s advice for directors trying to make films overseas was to start with a genre piece; he’d began his American career with the tough social drama Pretty Baby, and he later wondered if he should have instead done something in a less realist register, where people would forgive the […]
Reviews
The World is Yours: Scarface via Drunken Hell Holiday islands (Review)
Farès is a small-time drug dealer in France, with little enthusiasm to continue. He’s been trying to become a legitimate businessman, with the idea of setting up a company exporting freeze pops to North Africa. His chance has finally come, and he’s saved up 80,000 Euros for the opportunity… 80,000 […]
The Big Clock: Charles Laughton powered noir (Review)
Black Moon Rising (1986) John Carpenter albeit minus the craft (Review)
A Face in the Crowd: The American nightmare, years ahead of its time (Review)
An American television institution from the days before American sitcoms was the backbone of Channel Four, most Britons will be familiar with The Andy Griffith Show through its cultural after-effects, rather than the show itself. This writer first heard of it via the distorting mirror of ‘Floyd the Barber’, the […]
Breaking the Limits: Punkish Polish biopic (Review)
The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot: 21st-century tall tales (Review)
Shakespeare Wallah: Merchant Ivory Opulence missing a certain something (Review)
Made in 1965, Shakespeare Wallah was the second collaboration from Merchant Ivory and the first to really garner some international attention. Written by regular Merchant Ivory scribe Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the film was one of the earliest English-language speaking roles for acclaimed Bollywood actor Shashi Kapoor and marked the screen […]
Dragged Across Concrete: a tense thriller, a hard pill to swallow (Review)
Everybody in Our Family: Atmospheric, touching and defiantly small-scale (Review)
Previously, the only film by the Romanian director Radu Jude to receive a general release in the UK is Aferim!, an eccentric, stylized take on Western genre tropes that slowly reveals itself to be a commentary on a historical atrocity little-known outside Eastern Europe. Now, Second Run have released his […]