Two teenagers exchange letters. Both have considerable emotional baggage. The primary setting is the Deep South town of Baton Rouge, Louisiana (with some time in Tulsa, Oklahoma). Soft and lustrous lighting illuminates the hot and humid surroundings, prompting a dreamy sense of inertia in which contentment and frustration jostle for […]
Reviews
The Weapon The Hour The Motive (1972) A left turn too many for this rare Giallo (Blu-Ray Review)
Once upon a time, the Giallo as a sub-genre was primarily lost to obscurity – available only to those engaged in the tape trading scene. Even during the DVD boom era, this ever-sleazy wave of Italian murder mysteries never managed to break through. It has only been during the blu-ray […]
The Feast (2021): the first Welsh-language horror movie doesn’t want for ambition (Cinema Review)
The BFI currently determines which films are eligible to receive tax breaks using two tests: whether a film is British-financed, and whether it is “culturally British”. Breaking that down further, it is straightforward to think of films that are culturally Scottish, culturally English or culturally Irish, but very hard to […]
The Breaking Point (1950) Dark, Sweaty Classic Noir Lost in the Shadow of Legends (Review)
Howard Hawks once told Ernest Hemingway that he could make a film out of his worst novel. He told him this whilst they were on a fishing trip together, and for the remainder of the trip they worked on the screenplay together. Despite Hemingway himself working on the script, the […]
Umberto D (1952) I’m Not Crying OK? It’s Just Something In My Eye (Review)
Released to Criterion this week is Umberto D., Vittorio De Sica’s classic film about a pensioner who struggles to make ends meet in an economically-ravaged Italy in the post-war years. A retired civil servant, the ageing Umberto is determined to keep his dignity as he navigates a series of challenges […]
Desire (1958)/All My Good Countrymen (1968); Two Films by Vojtěch Jasný (Review)
Second Run are really spoiling us this week. This two-disc release may claim to be ‘Two films by Vojtěch Jasný, but it is in fact four; alongside the main features, 1958’s Desire (Touha, in its native Czech) and All My Good Countrymen (aka Všichni dobří rodáci) from a decade later, […]
The Killer Reserved Nine Seats (1974) Giallo, from the outside-in (Blu-Ray Review)
One of my favourite novels is Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. It’s a dark thriller where a group of ten guests are invited to a mysterious island, and then picked off one by one, as they realise the killer must be among them. When I heard that The […]
Memoria (2021): An Elegy For the Future (Blu-ray Review)
The American distribution by Neon of Memoria attempted to create a never-ending release whereby it would play at a single cinema for one night only and then move on to another one. At the time of writing, this process is still more or less in place, but evidently, the pandemic […]
Nitram (2021) The psychological dread of the unseen and “powerless” (VOD review)
Justin Kurzel is a filmmaker who understands dread and how to instil this feeling in his audience. Across his oeuvre, Kurzel has consistently created environments and narratives that create a sense of dread through intimate framing that bring the viewer queasily close, familiar spaces where horrific events occur and performances […]
The Deer King (2021) Too many characters fail to spoil this sumptuous anime (Cinema Review)
Once upon a time the name Production IG carried a certain gravitas. With works such as the 1995 film adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, the eerily seductive Blood: The Last Vampire and later to be recognised by the great Hollywood machine in the form of Quentin Tarantino (who requested […]