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.
Recent disks from England, part one
Tag: DVD
Criterion DVD Review: Judex (1963)
Georges Franju’s remake of Feuillade’s silent serial Judex is a mysterious dream of a movie which evokes the silent era through beautiful surfaces and ephemeral moods.
Recent Viewing: April and May, part three
Among other recent disks, Ben Wheatley’s A Field In England and Frank Perry’s The Swimmer use realistic performance and imagery to dig below material reality to strange symbolic and psychological depths, while the Estonian documentary Disco and Atomic War transforms the social and political facts of the Cold War into something strange and very funny.
Recent Viewing: April and May, part two
In recent years I’ve found myself watching – and liking – movies on disk which I initially had little interest in seeing when they first came out in theatres. Cases in point: the latest films by Ron Howard and the Coen Brothers.
Styles of Horror, part two
Recent disks offer a range of horror movies displaying commercial and artier approaches to the genre from Vincent Price vehicles from American-International to Roger Vadim’s visually rich LeFanu adaptation …et mourir de plaisir and Bill Gunn’s key Black Cinema offering from 1973, Ganja & Hess.
Styles of Horror, part one
Horror remains one of the most durable of genres, with a constant stream of disk releases of new and classic movies.
Notes on Recent Viewing, part one
A survey of recent viewing covers approaches to realism, metaphor, horror and war in a range of films from the 1920s to the 2010s.
Ghosts of Television Past, part 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 […]
The Lure of Paradise
If I had watched Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy a few weeks earlier, these three films would have made it into my year-end post as one of 2013’s highlights. I first encountered Seidl’s work (the documentary Animal Love and drama Dog Days) around the same time I came across Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher and Time […]
Year End 2013
Looking back over 2013, the most significant titles in my disk viewing have been imported from England or released by Criterion.
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