After seeing them feature in a plentiful amount of Hammer Horror films, I feel like I’m coming to terms with the charms of Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. Their ability to turn seemingly standard, flatlining stories of beasts and monsters into something acerbic and tense is a testament to their abilities […]
Reviews
Five Graves to Cairo (1943) Influential in Many Surprising Ways (Review)
One of the most curious Allied operations to occur during World War Two was arguably Operation Copperhead, masterminded by one Brigadier Dudley Clarke. A small military deception, Copperhead saw the Allies dupe the German high command whose intelligence expected General Bernard Montgomery to play a significant role in the 1944 […]
Our Hospitality (1923) An early Buster Keaton classic that excels as a narrative and a silent comedy (Review)
The silent era of comedy is one of the few genres that holds up rather well on the whole. Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton are the big names everyone associates this period with, and rightly so. The trio provided us with some of the most memorable and engaging […]
The Painted Bird (2019): Arthouse or Endurance Test? (Review)
Václav Marhoul’s WWII Eastern European-set film opens with a boy’s pet ferret being set alight and burned alive by a group of bullies. The sight of the ferret, disorientated, panicked and squealing in agony as it attempts the impossible and outrun the flames that so quickly engulf its body, ought […]
Melancholic (2018) Darkly Hilarious Romantic Dramedy with added Yakuza violence
Before launching into Third Window Films latest release in Seiji Tanaka’s Melancholic – allow me the indulgence of explaining what made me fall in love with East Asian cinema. Japanese, Chinese and Korean cinema take scant regard for tone or even genre, its much more common in that part of […]
Real (2019): breezy but uneven cycle through working-class romance (Review)
There’s something about bicycles in film, isn’t there? Ever since Vittoria de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves, the two-wheeled transport has been used to denote a kind of child’s-eye realism by Ridley Scott (Boy and Bicycle), the Dardenne brothers (The Kid With a Bike) and Haifaa al-Mansour (Wadjda). Even in the more […]
The Fifth Element (1997) – The most enjoyable Sci-Fi of the 1990s (Review)
Perhaps the biggest strength director Luc Besson has in his arsenal is his ability to construct an immediately endearing fantasy world. He does so with The Fifth Element, a sci-fi drama with sprinklings of comedy and whimsical light-heartedness, wrapped around a host of action set pieces, effective set and costume design, […]
Walkabout (1971): The Loss of Innocence and the Birth of Aussie New Wave (Review)
Coming to limited edition Blu-ray this week via the Second Sight label is Nicolas Roeg’s atmospheric, 1971 masterpiece Walkabout; a coming-of-age drama like no other, one which effectively heralded in the Australian New Wave movement. Starring Jenny Agutter, the director’s son Luc Roeg and indigenous Australian actor David Gulpilil, the […]
Tenderness: The Past is a Foreign Country in Martin Šulík’s (1991) Debut (Review)
Released in 1991, Tenderness (or Neha as it is known in its native Slovak) is director Martin Šulík’s debut full-length feature, one which proved to be a groundbreaking production for post-Communist Slovakia. The film tells the story of Simon, a solitary young student played by Géza Benkõ, and commences with […]
Story of a Love Affair (1950): lies, PIs and neorealism from Antonioni (Review)
Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature film begins with a set of photographs being displayed for the camera and a warning that this won’t be the same old story. Already, he’s making promises: promises of narrative innovation, clearly, and promises that the camera – and therefore the viewer – will be active […]