Twin Peaks the Return Episode 3 MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS CALL FOR HELP The FBI are back! What are they investigating, according to Miguel Ferrer’s still-peerlessly grouchy Albert Rosenfeld? “The absurd mystery of the strange forces of existence.” Oh. I see. Sounds more like an NSA job to me, but if you’re […]
surrealism
Twin Peaks the Return Episode 2 (The Rewatch)
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 – […]
Cosmos (2015) Żuławski ransacks his knowledge of art and pop culture for the most surreal swansong (Review)
It’s a strange world, but has it ever looked stranger than it does through the eyes of Witold Gombrowicz and Andrzej Żuławski? Żuławski was the late Polish director whose film Possession became quite the artiest thing on the Department of Public Prosecutions’ infamous ‘video nasties’ list. Gombrowicz was one of a generation of European authors who […]
Nostalgia (1983) Diving into Tarkovsky’s Deep End (Review)
Curzon Artificial Eye releases the penultimate film from Andrei Tarkovsky’s filmography in Nostalgia. Post-Stalker, Tarkovsky planned to make “The First Day” – a film that would interrogate atheism in the Soviet Union. Long story short. He had a major confrontation with Goskino (USSR committee for cinematography) whereby the half-finished film […]
Ken Russell: Great Composers (1965-7)(Review)
The music documentary is enjoying a boom period with the likes of 20,000 Days on Earth & Searching for Sugar Man receiving both critical and commercial acclaim, there’s also the channel defining content from the award-winning BBC Four. Staying with the British Broadcasting Corporation, it is easy to forget what […]
Just Jim (2015) Just another low-key actor/director project, only with a surrealist edge (Review)
Goto, Isle of Love (1968) Boro thriving on artifice and precision (Review)
The second feature in Arrow’s extensive restoration of Walerian Borowczyk’s work, Goto, Isle of Love is a live-action French film that cannot be anything other than the work of a Polish animator. Its venomous contempt for authority and its poker-faced sense of humour are both unmistakably Eastern European, and its […]