I remember being underwhelmed by my first encounter with George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. With a need to see if I was the problem, my ulterior motives for reviewing this re-release from Second Sight was that, hopefully, my confounded outlook on what I had deemed the weakest entrance […]
Reviews
Sweet Charity (1969): a musical for its time and ours (Review)
Put yourself in the mind of a moviegoer in 1969. At the time, it seemed like Hollywood was dying, struggling to compete with new, disruptive home-entertainment innovations. Even if they didn’t exist, though, the industry would be in trouble. Studios were ruinously focused on spectacle-driven tentpole films that were often […]
The Times of Harvey Milk (1984): You Can Kill the Man, But You Cannot Kill the Spirit (Review)
Released on Criterion Blu-ray this week is the Oscar-winning The Times of Harvey Milk, filmmaker Roger Epstein’s 1984 documentary about a true, political trailblazer, Harvey Milk. For many people, and certainly those of us on this side of the pond, Harvey Milk only really came to our attention thanks to […]
Eraserhead (1976) A Treasure Trove Release for Fans of David Lynch (Review)
“It’s like a guy with a hunchback growth, and you meet a pretty good surgeon who takes it off, cleans it up, hardly any scars, and you go away. And you’re very thankful that that’s gone.“ That’s David Lynch – what am I talking about, of course, it’s David Lynch […]
Topsy-Turvy (1999) Mike Leigh’s chaotic ode to the theatre (Review)
Art is (probably) dead. Years from now, when future generations look back on our cultural offerings, I feel like they’ll be underwhelmed. Perhaps I’m just being crude and narrow-minded, but the glory days of innovation and experimentation are long behind us. It’s why so many films set themselves in periods […]
Eva (1962): All About Eva (Review)
In 1945, the proclaimed king of thriller writers in Europe, James Hadley Chase penned his novel, Eve. Set in the seamy side of the Hollywood film industry, this psychological thriller told the story of Clive Thurston, a shipping clerk who stumbles upon a talented but TB-stricken writer who subsequently dies […]
College (1927) Buster Keaton, the director & the Performer (Review)
Buster Keaton enjoyed a wave of popularity rivalled only by Charlie Chaplin. His later works aren’t as fondly remembered as the likes of Modern Times or The Great Dictator, but College is a short and sweet example of just how great a performer and director Keaton was, and why he managed to compete with the […]
The Strangers (2008) One performance shy of the Modern Answer to Home Invasion Movies (Review)
Is horror, as a conglomerate of sub-genres, scary? Even as a fully signed up fan, I’d have to say no. Monster, both scientific and supernatural, have a distance to them, they don’t dig deep into the part of the subconscious where it becomes impossible to turn off as you can […]
Go West (1925) Keaton at his most charming getting the jump on the Western (Review)
After the somewhat serious tones found in Our Hospitality, I was ready for Buster Keaton’s work to blow me away entirely with a film that focused more on its comedy than it did on budding romances and family grievances. A Western comedy from one of the great minds of the silent era, […]
Eternal Beauty (2020) Dramady That Gets Mental Health Right (Review)
Craig Roberts, the pinched face and seemingly eternally adolescent Welsh actor best known for his starring role in Richard Ayoade’s Submarine, follows up his directorial debut Just Jim with Eternal Beauty, an offbeat comedy-drama that approaches the tricky subject of mental illness and is hitting cinemas from Friday October 2nd. […]