Film
Blu-ray: Columbia Noir #3Wednesday, 12 May 2021
Anxiety, injustice and desperate disorder are the themes of these six disparate noirs. In one, The Dark Past, Lee J. Cobb’s psychiatrist draws a crude diagram of the brain with a line dividing the conscious and unconscious, and these films visit the... Read more... |
Milestone review - parable of an aging truckerMonday, 10 May 2021
Watching Milestone, a new Netflix original directed by Ivan Ayr, I was reminded of the films of the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. This story about an aging truck driver facing redundancy whilst grieving for his wife attempts the still... Read more... |
Blu-ray: RawTuesday, 04 May 2021
Raw opens with a bang, a distant figure on a remote country road stepping out in front of a car, causing it to crash into a tree. What’s really happened isn’t made clear until we’re well into French director Julia Ducournau’s 2016 feature. Part... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Chalk GardenSunday, 02 May 2021
Enid Bagnold’s 1955 English play The Chalk Garden, a Broadway hit before it opened in the West End, is usually described as a comedy because of Bagnold’s acerbic dialogue and droll appreciation of intricate employer-servant dynamics. If most of the... Read more... |
Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation review - genius dogged by disappointmentSaturday, 01 May 2021
Kindred literary spirits who overlapped in any number of ways make for riveting stuff in Truman & Tennessee: An Intimate Conversation. Filmmaker Lisa Immordino Vreeland folds archival footage of the legendary writers together with... Read more... |
The Artist's Wife review - uninspired portrait of dementia in the HamptonsWednesday, 28 April 2021
“The only child I’ve ever had is you,” the artist’s wife (Lena Olin), spits at the artist, her considerably older husband (Bruce Dern), who retorts, “That was your goddamn choice so don’t blame it on me.”Although the setting – a wintery East Hampton... Read more... |
Blu-ray: To Sir, with LoveTuesday, 27 April 2021
To Sir, With Love is a very loose adaptation of ER Braithwaite’s autobiographical novel. Reflecting on his experiences as a teacher in London’s East End in the late 1940s, Braithwaite’s commentary (one of two provided here) advises us that “as you... Read more... |
Oscars 2021: Sluggish, yes, but some surprises tooMonday, 26 April 2021
“God gave us 12 notes,” said Jon Batiste as he accepted the Best Score Oscar for the animated film Soul. True enough, even if it felt from very early on as if the 93rd Academy Awards might well last 12 hours, the ceremony flickering to life in its... Read more... |
Black Bear review - unexpected knotty treatMonday, 26 April 2021
We’ve all experienced the “fast food film” – enjoyable while we watch it, but realise afterwards it was an empty thrill with little nutritional value. Much rarer is the film that can only be truly appreciated once the credits roll. Black Bear, with... Read more... |
DVD/Blu-ray: County LinesSunday, 25 April 2021
The website of the National Crime Agency offers the following definition of County Lines: “[it is] where illegal drugs are transported from one area to another, often across police and local authority boundaries (although not exclusively), usually... Read more... |
Sisters With Transistors review - the forgotten frontierThursday, 22 April 2021
From deep within the bowels of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop came the sounds of the future. Strange howls and beeps, unnatural yet recognisably human-made. And while this was the dawning of a new epoch for music, it was also the frontier of a larger... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Straight Shooting / Hell BentTuesday, 20 April 2021
There are moments in Straight Shooting (1917), the first feature directed by John (then "Jack") Ford, when its star Harry Carey (1878-1947) exudes a naturalism that the famous Western actors who followed him, most notably John Wayne, strove to... Read more... |
