Among fans of European genre cinema of the 70s, Sergio Martino is best known for his killer run within the Giallo sub-genre: all the colours of the dark (1972), Torso (1973), Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key (1972), The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh […]
Reviews
Tales from the Urban Jungle: Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) (Review)
Film noir’s spiritual home has always been the streets. With The Naked City, though, Jules Dassin made that spiritual home into a literal home. Previous films had cooked up bustling metropolitan locations on Hollywood sound-stages, but Dassin’s film was the first film to take advantage of the new lightweight cameras […]
The Frightened City (1961) Connery on the Cusp (Review)
Released to StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics Collection this week, The Frightened City is a 1961 British noir from Canadian-born director John Lemont about protection rackets in London’s West End. It’s a solid, if fairly unremarkable gangland thriller, one which would perhaps be lost to the mists of time were it not […]
Death Has Blue Eyes (1975) Skittish Greek Misadventures with the Lads (Review)
Greece isn’t exactly at the top of world cinema exporters – however, two names that have any cultural cache are Yorgos Lanthimos and the late Theo Angelopoulos. Even with that being the case, the country still managed to produce one of the nastier examples of 1970s horror, Nico Mastorakis’s Island […]
The Bloodhound (2020) Somewhere between David Lynch and Yorgos Lanthimos (Review)
In a package of interviews, Patrick Picard, writer/director of the Bloodhound – the latest of Arrow Video’s celebrations of young indie darlings – presents an idea that many horror literature fans may baulk at – Edgar Allan Poe was at his best when setting up a mystery. He also goes […]
Classic Film Kid: The Invisible Man Appears (1949)(Review)
Contains Mild Spoilers Hello everyone, the Classic Film Kid is back with possibly the strangest review I’ve ever done as we take a look at two films that have just been released in the UK for the very first time: The Invisible Man Appears (1949), and The Invisible Man vs. […]
Two Martial Arts Films: Russian Raid (2020) & Winners and Sinners (1983)
In its own way, the martial arts movie is as broad a church as anything. Other genres have their stock situations and standard plot beats, but the only beats martial arts cinema cares about are the ones delivered to the side of a goon’s skull. As long as the fighting […]
I Was at Home, But… (2019) A Reserved, Existentialist Euro-Drama (Review)
Existentialism is often considered a crisis. When an individual thinks about their life and it’s meaning, impossible questions are posed. It is a common recurrence for those, like me, who have no idea what they are doing with themselves, their lives or their emotions. I Was at Home, But… the award-winning film […]
Lost in America (1985): some kind of comic masterpiece (Review)
Introducing himself to various people on a road trip across America, David Howard explains his project as follows: “We’ve dropped out of society”. Yet the first stop he and his wife Linda make on their journey is Las Vegas, a town whose inhabitants live, as the Joker so sagely informs […]
Kagemusha (1980) Kurosawa, the master visual story-teller (Blu-ray Review)
74 years old Akira Kurosawa was when he directed Kagemusha. And, funnily enough, the 1970s weren’t a kind decade to the master director with the highest-profile film, of the three he produced that decade, being the marginal Serbian Adventure Movie, Dersu Uzala. A point stressed in the extras of this […]