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 […]
Blu Ray
Look Back in Anger (1959) the film that helped establish British kitchen-sink realism (Review)
Youth (2017) Part political treatise, part dance movie, and part horror of War movie (Review)
Back to 1942 is one of the bleakest movies of recent years, Feng Xiaogang directed a horrifying presentation on the human cost of war. The 2012 movie showed an invading army turning their weapons on civilians, people selling their children just so said offspring can eat and enough self-sacrifice to […]
The Colour of Pomegranates (1969) impenetrably profound and dazzlingly superficial (Review)
Maybe you find that challenging, or intimidating, or mind-numbing, or somewhere between all three. If so, I’m not exactly sweetening the pot if I tell you that the film is a series of oblique, poetic tableaux vivants that symbolically illustrate the inner and outer life of the 18th century Armenian […]
Phenomena (1985) Dario Argento side steps the Giallo to bring the wildest and most fun horror of his career (Review)
Manina, the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter (1949) Host to the Best Extra Feature of 2017? (Review)
Let’s get the big issue out of the way first: Eureka’s new Blu-ray release of Manina, the Lighthouse-Keeper’s Daughter by Willy Rozier boasts the most unexpected and delightful extra feature of the year. It actually pertains not to the title feature, but to another Rozier film included as a bonus, […]
Doberman Cop (1977) A peculiar Sonny Chiba character in an endlessly odd police thriller (Review)
Once upon a time, it was instantly apparent when a film was based on a comic or graphic novel as those films concerned themselves with the super-powered and the otherworldly, then around the mid-1990s there was a paradigm shift and the nature of these titles became indistinguishable from the more […]
Daughters of the Dust (1991) recalls Tarkovsky, Resnais or any other sanctified European arthouse auteur you might care to name (Review)
Julie Dash’s debut film turned 25 last year, but even without the anniversary, this sumptuous BFI restoration would still probably exist. In the late 2010s, the film has become more relevant than ever. It is an inspiration for a new generation of African-American directors – Ava DuVernay has repeatedly cited […]