For my money, Alec Guinness is one of the greatest British character actors of all time. No matter if he was playing the buck-toothed Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers, or the wise and mysterious Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, Guinness always brought elegance, wit, and charm to his performances. Rewind […]
Reviews
Kolobos (1999) soft satire, but hard gore (Review)
Ray & Liz (2018) Trading Memories of a Working-Class North (Review)
The Black Country born photographer and artist Richard Billingham first came to fame in the mid to late 1990s, when his award-winning photographic collection of his working-class parents formed part of Charles Saatchi’s YBA exhibition, ‘Sensation’. At the height of what was known as ‘Cool Britannia’, Billingham’s uncompromising look to the […]
Possum (2018) a bleakness from beyond the dark place (Review)
Part [The] Babadook and part David Lynch fuelled nightmare, Matthew Holness’s directorial debut, Possum, is as bleak and oppressive as psychological horror gets. Unfortunately, I get the impression that Holness would’ve been better suited turning Possum into a portmanteau film rather than a feature of its own. And that’s fine, […]
Sink the Bismarck! (1960) A British Stiff-Upper Lip Vision of Heroism (Review)
Directed by Lewis Gilbert, the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! tells the true-life story of the Royal Navy’s mission to track down and destroy the eponymous pride of the German fleet and scourge of Atlantic shipping. Making it’s UK Blu-ray debut on the Eureka Classics label, it’s a distinctive film […]
The Boys In The Band (1970) After Stonewall, Before Pride (Review)
He may be associated with the tough, transgressive American cinema of the 1970s, but there’s a part of William Friedkin that would have made a first-rate Old Hollywood journeyman. Peers like Francis Ford Coppola and Paul Schrader have recently been making personal, self-penned projects, but Friedkin’s 21st-century career renaissance came […]
Ring (1998) The Most Important J-Horror For Good Reason (Review)
Hideo Nakata’s Ring is famously the film that triggered the western world’s awareness that yes, Asian countries do make horror films. It also famously triggered a slew of sequels and remakes, from the Korean The Ring Virus to the recent American Rings. It’s undeniably important in horror cinema, but being […]
Parents (1989) Anti-Cannibal Comedy-Horror via John Waters & David Lynch (Review)
The Unholy (1988) The Fine Line Between Religious Horror And Satanic Panic (Review)
Shoah The Four Sisters (2018) Chamber Pieces From A Historical Nightmare (Review)
Even before his death in July 2018, Claude Lanzmann was always easier to imagine in retrospect. He remained a public figure into his nineties, and a valuable one at that: thoughtful, eloquent, combative when necessary. His work, though, was dominated by two time periods. The first was the period from […]