In 1984 Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird released a little known black and white comic on their very own Mirage label, following the adventures of four teenaged mutant ninja turtles and their surrogate father, a Rat named Splinter, only 3000 copies were produced of that initial run, hoping to cover […]
Reviews
István Szabó: Mephisto/Colonel Redl/Hanussen (1981-1988) Faustian Pacts & A Landmark Trilogy on Complicity
Released to Blu-ray by Second Run this week is a boxset of films from acclaimed Hungarian director István Szabó. Made between 1981 and 1988, these three films (Szabó himself is loathe to term them as a trilogy, though they have thematic- to say nothing of geographic and historical – similarities) […]
City on Fire (1987) How Ringo Lam Defined Hong Kong’s “Heroic Bloodshed” Genre
In the early 80s there was a new breed of action film starting to plant roots. A genre that kept a lot of the righteous chivalry of old but now it was no longer the pursuit of mastery in the martial world, it was the gun that ruled supreme. Stories […]
Testimony (2025): sensitively reopening the case on Ireland’s darkest secrets
The Magdalene Laundries were never really a secret. The official McAleese Report into the institutions claimed that around 11,000 Irish women were held in these institutions after the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922. Aoife Kelleher’s documentary Testimony, released in UK and Irish cinemas this weekend, draws on […]
The Maiku Hama Trilogy (1994-6) Film Noir through a Vividly Japanese Lens
Anyone mourning the recent cancellation of Rian Johnson’s Poker Face might find a more than acceptable substitute in the form of Third Window Films’s new Blu-Ray release, The Maiku Hama Trilogy. They may be a series of films rather than a television series, but they have exactly the right stand-alone […]
Pocket Money (1976): joyful, humane, ripe for rediscovery
François Truffaut’s empathy for, and skill at directing, children stretches all the way back to his first feature The 400 Blows, which launched the career of Jean-Pierre Leaud and is frequently cited as one of the all-time great directorial debuts. Pocket Money, released on Blu-Ray by Radiance Films, is rarely […]
Shelby Oaks (2024) Chris Stuckmann’s Confident If Cluttered Directorial Debut
Watching Shelby Oaks in cinemas was a far more cathartic experience personally than previously anticipated. Chris Stuckmann is, in my humble opinion, the best movie critic to come out of YouTube throughout the 2010s. He’s always been more critically-minded than Jeremy Jahns (no disrespect to him, who I also watch […]
Frankenstein (2025) Visually Dazzling and Emotionally invested take on a Literary Legend
Although Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was certainly something I was looking forward to, I’m also not blind to the inherent fear that yet another director would finally deliver their long-gestating big-budget passion project, and find it completely underwhelming. Large-scale passion projects seem to have a tendency to go wrong. Infamously, […]
Kontinental ’25 (2025) Hard-to-swallow satire from Romania’s smartest joker
Romanian satirist and experimental filmmaking punk rocker Radu Jude told us to not expect too much from the end of the world in, well, Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World, an epic farce of an essay about what it means to barely get by off the […]
Manthan (1976): the birth of crowd-funding?
After The Circus Tent and Ishanou, Second Run once again partners with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur’s Film Heritage Foundation for another restoration of a classic Indian film made outside the country’s mainstream industry. Few further outside, I reckon, than Shyam Benegal’s Manthan. Benegal had made a couple of documentaries about Operation […]