When we think of Woodfall films we invariably think of the drama genre, unique to the British film industry, known as ‘kitchen sink’. After all, it was a genre they had certainly made their name off the back of, with an impressive track record straight from the traps; Look Back […]
Reviews
A Ciambra (2017) Neo-Italian Social Neo-Realism fails to recapture the magic of the masters (Review)
A spectre is haunting cinema— the spectre of Italian neorealism. Spectral, because despite the critical and cultural ripples made by films like The Florida Project, American Honey, and Valeska Grisebach’s Western, these non-professional actors, semi-real situations and hitherto unexplored settings tend to be forgotten by awards season. The genre, which […]
Iron Monkey (1993) One of the best entry points of Kung-Fu Cinema (Review)
Look Back in Anger (1959) the film that helped establish British kitchen-sink realism (Review)
Jubilee (1978) Pure Punk and Pure Derek Jarman (Review)
The Defiant Ones (1958) one of the most crushing, pessimistic examples of the Hays Code in action (Review)
This summer, you might have already seen two very different people, chained together, forced to co-operate in order to escape their captivity. They even climbed out of a mud-pit; if you weren’t thinking about The Defiant Ones (about two chain-gang prisoners, one white and one black, in a similar mess) […]
The Mercy (2017) James Marsh delivers arguably his finest fictional narrative cinematic feature yet (Review)
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Sunday Times Golden Globe Race; the first single-handed, round the world (with no stops) yacht race. The race remains deeply controversial as only one yachtsman managed to finish and another, the failing businessman and amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst, encountered so many difficulties […]
Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (1985) The Antidote to Biopic Fatigue (Review)
An extraordinary film even by the standards of Criterion’s UK catalogue, Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters is your go-to film to counter accusations that biopics are inherently stuffy, stylistically conservative Oscar-bait. And it’s all thanks to Hank Williams. After surviving the excesses of the ’70s New Hollywood, […]
Loveless (2017) A Russian apocalyse within a dissolving marriage (Review)
Russian cinema is certainly one for its figureheads. Sergei Eisenstein was instrumental in many theories that would go on to establish the cinematic language. Andrei Tarkovsky established and nigh on perfected the arthouse. And since his passing there wasn’t really much of a centrepiece for Russian cinema, as such, it […]
The Mountain of the Cannibal God (1978) Not the Video Nasty Cannibal Horror you are looking for (Review)
The chances are that you’ve heard of the video nasties panic that gripped the UK during the 1980’s. 72 films were prosecuted by the British government for corrupting public morals, because one of the principal causes of violence and perversion in society are films. At least, that was the theory. […]