Asked to name a David Lean film, most people would plump for Lawrence of Arabia or The Bridge on the River Kwai before they mentioned Summertime. Yet this holiday romance was Lean’s favourite of his own movies, and Criterion UK’s new Blu-Ray suggests plenty of reasons why. Before he became […]
Reviews
Universal Terror: A Collection of Comforting Karloff Cinema (1937/1944/1952)(Blu-ray Review)
It cannot be overstated how much Boris Karloff’s performance in Frankenstein deserves its iconic status. The physicality and emotional expressiveness he brings to the Monster still have emotional resonance and rightly made Karloff a star. However, he had already been acting for over a decade by this point and Frankenstein […]
Larks on a String (1969): saved from the scrapheap of censorship (Review)
Jiří Menzel’s Larks on a String, released on Blu-Ray for the first time by Second Run, won the Golden Bear at the 1990 Berlin International Film Festival – an impressive feat for any film, but a remarkable one when you consider Menzel’s film was twenty-one years old at that point. […]
Manifesto (2022) Forlorn yet unbowed (Cinema Review)
Manifesto, currently doing the rounds in selected cinemas, is the final instalment in the Hope Trilogy from Liverpudlian director Daniel Draper. The previous films in this series included the Dennis Skinner documentary Nature of the Beast and The Big Meeting, a documentary about the Durham Miners Gala. Slotted neatly in […]
Extreme Prejudice (1987) Jack of all Genres, Master of Some? (Blu-ray Review)
The 1980s can be defined by many elements. Big hair and shoulder pads, bright colours, rampant consumerism. Cinematically, the decade saw the development of a particular type of action movie, a sub-genre that reconstituted American masculinity severely wounded by the Vietnam War with Reaganite assertion and nationalism. Indeed, the presidency […]
Tremors 4K (1990) Electric Paced Creature Feature & ‘Modern’ Classic (Blu-ray Review)
Tremors, Ron Underwood’s 1990 creature feature & ode to the classics made in the 50s, is there any movie that is served worse by the franchise it spawned? Based on the fact that it has gone out of control, spanning a further 23 films – at the time of writing […]
Wayfinder (2022): a wilderness that could do with more wildness (Review)
Normally, when reviewing a debut feature, it’s fruitless to look to the director’s back catalogue for comparison points. Either they’re so new that there aren’t any, or you relegate yourself to pointing out the obvious. (Try not to fall off your chair, but I think Emma Seligman’s 2018 short Shiva […]
Ultrasound (2021) The Sci-Fi of Questioning reality in a bold feature Debut (VOD review)
“What is real? How do you define real?” asks Morpheus in the first (and let’s pretend, only) Matrix film. It’s a well-trodden area for dramas, thrillers, and sci-fi films, in particular, to explore. Mental illness, memory loss, dreams, unreliable narrators, mind control, and simulations; all have been used as plot […]
High Crime (1973) The Case of the Classic Poliziotteschi and its Cut Ending (Review)
Throughout the 60s and 70s American cinema underwent a tonal shift; gone were the days of the sweet sentimentalism of directors like Frank Capra and here was the growing cynicism from people like William Friedkin and Don Siegel. The latter two directors released two highly influential films in the world […]
Edge of Sanity (1989) Jekyll, Hyde & Jack the Ripper in thinly-spread Erotic Horror (Review)
Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) is one of the more regularly adapted and reimagined texts in science fiction literature, up there with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Whilst based on historical fact, conspiracy and theory, Jack the Ripper has enjoyed just as many takes throughout […]