Jon Fairhurst offers an original approach to film analysis by proposing the possible influence of a classic text on David Lynch’s Eraserhead in the form of a graphic novel, The Key to Eraserhead, released as an ebook on the 40th anniversary of the film’s first public screening at Filmex in Los Angeles on March 19, 1977.
A round-up of recent Blu-ray viewing, with some classics, an occasional dud, and a few old favourites.
An evening of pizza and movies plunged me and my friend Steve into the depths of no-budget horror with a double dose of Ed Wood (Bride of the Monster, 1955) and Andy Milligan (The Man With Two Heads, 1972).
Hammer Films are, of course, best known for launching the modern era of horror with their late ’50s colour reworkings of the Universal classics from the ’30s, beginning with Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula (1958). These movies, colourful, somewhat perverse for the time, and more graphic than earlier films in the genre, inspired Roger […]
Three more black-and-white movies in excellent Blu-ray editions – Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die!, Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow and John Baxter’s Love on the Dole – offer yet another reminder of the richness of monochrome film art.
Criterion have released a gorgeous restoration of Ermanno Olmi’s 1978 masterpiece The Tree of Wooden Clogs, supplementing this immersive epic of 19th Century peasant life with several epics which explore the origins of the project and Olmi’s methods of working with his remarkable non-professional cast.
Although it’s impossible to keep up with all the disks from Twilight Time, I’ve recently been binging on some of their newer releases.
Paul W.S. Anderson wraps up his 15-year zombie apocalypse with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter (2016), one of the best episodes in the series, while Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan (2016) scales the zombie heights in style.
The pleasures of black-and-white cinematography are on full display in Ken Hughes’ The Small World of Sammy Lee; shot on the streets of Soho and the East End by the great Wolfgang Suschitzky, this story of a small-time entertainer and compulsive gambler desperately trying to raise cash to pay off a gangster is a finely observed depiction of the seedier side of pre-Swinging London, shot through with bleak humour and the tentative possibility of redemption.
M. Night Shyamalan’s Split (2017) in one of his most accomplished films yet, a taut, tense psychological thriller in which every character, even the “villain”, elicits audience sympathy.