After their great re-release of Juraj Herz’s ‘The Cremator’ on Blu-Ray late last year, Second Run have kindly followed that up by restoring another fan favourite Czech title – Ivan Passer’s ‘Intimate Lighting’. Like his close friend and collaborator, the late Miloš Forman, Passer is uninterested in creating a melodramatic […]
Second Run
The Cremator (1968) an absolute essential to watch for all Czech New Wave Fans (Review)
Witchhammer (1969) The Best Witch Trials movie ever made (Review)
Reality is something to be surpassed in horror. The promotional line of being based on a ‘true story’ is something which is used as a basic inspiration point as illustrated by the original Amityville and Conjuring movies or the countless identikit exorcism films using this in their marketing spiel. Witch […]
Vampir Cuadecuc (1971) A Surprisingly Sensual and Beautiful avant-garde Vampire Movie (Review)
Sometime in the early 2000s, a Peruvian government spokesman was forced to testily deny online rumours that some of the country’s cabinet were vampires. “A government cannot go around sucking the blood of its people”, the spokesman claimed, inviting the obvious rejoinder; which government has ever refrained from this? The […]
My 20th Century (1989) a full-on thermonuclear blast of intellectual, comic and sensory pleasure (Review)
“We live in the flicker”, Joseph Conrad famously wrote, referring to the breathless speed of technological advancement in the crossover from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. In addressing the same historical period, Ildikó Enyedi’s debut film My 20th Century – released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Second Run – […]
Someday My Prince Will Come (2005) / Philip and His Seven Wives (2006): Two Films by Marc Isaacs
This welcome Second Run DVD release comprises two early films from the excellent British documentary filmmaker Marc Isaacs entitled Someday My Prince Will Come (2005) and Philip and His Seven Wives (2006). On the first inspection, they could be considered strange bedfellows with very little shared between each film other […]
Three Wishes For Cinderella (1973) A Christmas Favourite in Mainland Europe for all the right reasons (Review)
Stella Cadente (2014) Shakespeare’s Richard II as a Peter Greenaway film (Review)
Anybody wondering whether Stella Cadente is a traditional royal costume drama will have their questions answered about twenty-six minutes in, when the King’s assistant goes out to the woods to have sex with a melon while an aria from Madame Butterfly plays. As confident in its own eccentricities as you’d […]
Electra My Love (1974) The world’s finest historical, political dance movie (Review)
Whether Slovak, Hungarian or South East Asian, a country’s cinematic output requires a degree of cultural and historical context; add (the) former Czechoslovakia, and you have the cross-section that makes up the DNA of Second Run’s remit. Nuances naturally occur, but the consistencies in these nations are modern histories demarcated […]