Although the idea of creating lists of the “best” is always problematic, the attempt often provides the impetus to think about and reevaluate our own likes, dislikes and judgements. The recent Sight & Sound list of “the greatest documentaries of all time” affords an opportunity to think about what actually qualifies as documentary and to talk about personal favourites.
Arrow have released an excellent edition of Donald Cammell’s little-seen White of the Eye, a marital drama disguised as a serial killer movie, along with an excellent selection of extras that throw light on the troubled director’s career.
The latest Flipside release from the BFI, Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling, is like a cross between a gritty Ken Loach working class story and a Children’s Film Foundation fantasy of kid empowerment.
The consequences of one man’s decision in Steven Knight’s Locke outweigh the fate of the world in Doug Liman’s Edge of Tomorrow.
Warners, once in the forefront of quality disk supplements, now more often releases bare bones titles even when the movies cry out for commentaries and documentaries to illuminate their importance.
Two disks illustrate the spectrum of British genre production in the ’70s and ’80s: Pete Walker’s cinematic horror Frightmare and David Rudkin’s epic BBC fantasy Artemis 81.
The work of the great English cinematographer Oswald Morris, in both colour and black-and-white, added enormously to the films he worked on. He had a long and fruitful association with John Huston (his work on Moulin Rouge in 1952 pushed the boundaries of what Technicolor was supposed to be able to do), and also shot […]
Three recent disks showcase performances by interesting actors in less-than-reputable movies: Klaus Kinski in Crawlspace, Udo Kier in The House on Straw Hill, and Peter Cushing in Corruption.
While some of the films and plays in the series of disks I wrote about last week, devoted to ghost and horror stories made for British television, reveal the budgetary and technical limitations of their time and medium (low budget sets, somewhat coarse and murky video recording), the BFI has lavished its attention on one […]
The English love ghost stories. There are the classics, of course – Hamlet and Macbeth, for instance – but after the advent of Gothic literature in the late 1700s, spirits, whether harmful or helpful, became less distant, increasingly incorporated into contemporary life. From penny dreadfuls to Dickens, ghosts impinged on the lives of characters not […]