Against the backdrop of a 2023 which brought a BFI retrospective, and what looks to be his late career masterpiece, EO, comes this release from Second Run of three of Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s key early works. They show a truly forward thinking director, whose work from this era remains relatively under-seen compared to his contemporaries, despite it containing some true classics of the European New Wave.
DVD, bluray & video
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One of the great lost traditions of British television, the BBC’s Ghost Stories For Christmas ran through the seventies and remain fondly remembered, a singularly British reading of classic horror stories.
Blue Underground Blue Underground‘s 4k restoration of Lucio Fulci‘s The House By The Cemetery is a handsome beast indeed. Cloaked in a faux-3D lenticular cover, it consists of three discs — two blu rays featuring the movie itself and a really quite ridiculous amount of extras, and a CD of Walter Rizzati‘s soundtrack. The movie itself forms the final part of what is sometimes called Fulci’s Gates Of […]
Demiurg / London 3 March 2019 This is a story of two enigmas. One is an inscrutable totalitarian art-rock collective, and the other is the most secretive state on Earth. And this is all about what happened when the two collided to the strains of a much-loved feel-good musical with Nazis in it. Laibach have been defying musical and artistic conventions and outraging public decency for nearly forty […]
Buried Treasure It’s taken me a while to process this. I’m still processing it. I’ve watched this right the way through three times and jumped around in it (you will go into it, if you bother to go at all) a few more; selecting little movements, trying to find ways to explain what it is.
Cleopatra Entertainment Disney‘s Beauty And The Beast famously likes to call itself “a tale as old as time”, but traditional though a young girl marrying a lion may be in the circles YOU move in, I’d argue an older tale was that eternal staple of the cautionary tale, the tale of the Devil’s bargain.
MVD For me, Morphine was one of the most important alternative bands to come form the USA in the Nineties. Their sound was unique and it is not often that can be said about a band, particularly a three-piece coming from the thriving post-punk and independent scene of Boston.
Bad Seed One More Time With Feeling was designed to ideally be watched before Skeleton Tree was released; so to watch it for the first time now, after living with that raw, naked and shivering mass of beauty and heartbreak is, clearly, a very different experience than that originally intended. But I don’t think that makes it any less powerful a film in its own right.
Drafthouse / MVD John Rad‘s Dangerous Men is probably, unfortunately for me, review-proof. Made on a shoestring by Rad, an Iranian who moved to America literally 24 hours before Khomeini got in and — understandably — decided not to go back, it’s a crazy slice of slam-bang crime action, and it may just be the Deadly Premonition of moves when it comes to asking “is it any good?”
MVD Robert Mugge’s film A Joyful Noise is like stepping into a time machine. He has captured a unique insight into a particularly mystical bubble of 1980s African American counter-culture. Although, thinking about it, our main protagonist Mr Mystery, AKA Sun Ra, might not be too interested in limiting himself to any earth-based ethnicity.
Zoharum Presented in a double-disc package containing both CD and DVD versions, the former holding the music in standalone album format, while the latter combines it with the visuals, which are not merely an addendum, but integral to WIDT‘s work.
Arrow Films As I write this, the horror community is mourning the loss of Gunnar Hansen, whose turn (yes, that one, round and round with a buzzing saw in the middle of the road in the blazing sun) as Leatherface helped put Tobe Hooper on the map, Texas Chainsaw Massacre having not only been a huge hit, but unbeknownst to anyone having also changed the face of horror […]
Arrow Films Aleksei German‘s Hard To Be A God is sci-fi in the Tarkovsky tradition, very much a state of mind rather than flashy tech and shiny spaceship CGI. The film is based on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky‘s 1964 novel of the same name, and was completed after the director’s death by his son Aleksei German Jr. The back story is that a group of earth scientists (although […]
Arrow Films If you were to look for a definition of the term “cult movie”, you might find the huge stone face of Zardoz staring back at you from the page, bellowing “the gun is good, the penis is bad”. Because it is for this and dozens of other images of batshit unheimlich that Zardoz has earned its cult status.
Second Sight Films Penelope Spheeris‘s epic three-part documentary series about the shifting scene in music in LA in the ’80s and ’90s makes even more interesting viewing now than it did before. Well, I’m mostly talking about the first two movies, as until now I’ve never seen the third. The documentary form, as well as Spheeris’s hands-off style (of which more later) mean that instead of becoming dated, […]
Ektro Shot over two nights in February 2011, at the Dynamo in Turku and the next day at YK-Klubi in Helsinki, Silta is one of the few Circle DVDs1 released so far which give the viewer a close approximation of the live experience of this most uncategorisably outré of bands. The Dynamo footage which forms the first part is filtered in sepia tones and framed within an oval […]
MVD Gabriel Carrer‘s In The House Of Flies is an ’80s movie, made in the second decade of the twenty-first century designed around a trope from the first which became a cliché and eventually a sub-genre all of its own, though it does a bloody good job of avoiding cliché and in the process returns the trope to its ingenious origins. Remember Saw? The first one, I mean. […]
Film 4 His wife mostly hides. I think she knows what he’s going to say, or rather what he’s not going to say. She’s central and peripheral in this tale and that seems about right since so is Nick. He’s in every scene and every scene is about him (or, more properly, for him) but we don’t get anything as ‘startlingly frank’ as you’d imagine. He’s there but […]