Another eclectic selection of movies I’ve watched in the past few months, ranging from a politically nuanced spaghetti western to spectacular action, lush anime, a big-screen travelogue, various horrors from low to relatively high-budget, a charming coming-of-age comedy, a nightmare with uncanny life-sized puppets, and a rediscovered vérité comedy from the late-’60s.
Recent acquisitions from Arrow and Radiance cover a range of genres from Japanese B-movie crimes to traditional ghost stories, lingering traces of German fascism, a Poe adaptation filtered through pandemic anxieties, a pair of Italian genre movies, and Sam Raimi’s masterful neo-noir A Simple Plan (1998).
Four releases from the BFI offer excellent presentations of a pair of features from the 1970s which didn’t leave much of a mark at the time but are well worth rediscovering – Richard Loncraine’s Flame (1975) and Simon Perry’s Eclipse (1977) – and two recent experimental features – Bait (2019), Enys Men (2022) – by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, which provide a hand-crafted glimpse of disruptive social change in a timeless landscape.
It’s hard to believe, but this is my 1000th post since I started writing this blog back in October 2010. Not having missed a single week since that first post – and often posting more than once a week – my writing here has been the most sustained activity I’ve ever undertaken. While there’s no doubt an element of ego involved in putting this much personal opinion out into the world, the blog has served something of a self-therapeutic purpose, providing focus and a personal challenge to off-set the tedium of the federal government clerical job I landed after my editing career dried up. Having retired six months ago, I’m finding myself wondering whether the blog has served its purpose and the time has come to look for other creative pursuits.
Criterion’s new edition of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil (1985) presents an impressive new 4K restoration which highlights the dense, endlessly inventive production design of Gilliam’s blackly comic dystopian vision of a world run by an oppressive but utterly incompetent bureaucracy, even more pertinent now than it was in the middle of Reagan’s presidency. The three-disk, dual-format set includes a comprehensive history of the production and the controversy surrounding Gilliam’s fight to get the film released, as well as the truly awful alternate “Love Conquers All” cut put together by Universal in a misguided attempt to make the film “more commercial”.
One of the benefits of retirement is being able to go to weekday matinees, which means seeing movies in almost empty theatres – the best way as far as I’m concerned. So this year I’ve already seen more movies than all of last year or the year before . But that also means I’ve seen a few movies I probably wouldn’t have bothered with before. Among the duds, though, have been some good – or at least interesting – movies I’m glad I saw on a big screen.
A pair of DVDs from the now-defunct Network Releasing unearth forgotten artefacts from British television history; The Frighteners, an anthology of concise half-hour psychological thrillers from 1972-73, and three one-hour dramas displaying the range of the influential writer Nigel Kneale – The Crunch (Michael Elliott, 1964), a political thrillers, Ladies’ Night (Herbert Wise, 1986), a satirical comedy about a conservative establishment crumbling in the face of feminism, and Gentry (Roy Battersby, 1987), in which a bourgeois couple cashing in the decline of an East End community are confronted by the anger of those being displaced.
Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007) is one of the best – and most mind-bending – time travel paradox movies, a rigorous, darkly comic puzzle in which cause and effect are twisted in knots as a middle-class man finds his identity fragmented by repeated short jumps in time.
In 1953 Hammer Films took the first step on a path which would soon give the company an international reputation as a key purveyor of horror movies. Terence Fisher’s Four Sided Triangle, a modest production which combined science fiction, psychological horror and romantic melodrama in a prosaic English village setting laid the groundwork which would lead two year later to Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), and two more years beyond that to Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the movie which changed the course of modern horror cinema. Hammer’s 4K restoration of Four Sided Triangle will hopefully dispel the film’s rather low reputation, with a beautiful new transfer, two commentaries and three interview featurettes which argue for its value as a pioneering contribution to British genre cinema.
In his latest film, The Shrouds (2024), David Cronenberg has made his most personal work since The Brood (1979), transforming grief into a meditation of mortality which, while at times uncomfortably revelatory, is nonetheless shot through with a dark vein of humour.