BFI
DVD/Blu-ray: All We Imagine as LightTuesday, 29 April 2025
All We Imagine as Light focuses on the lives of three women in contemporary Mumbai; as shown by director Payal Kapadia, the city is arguably the film’s fourth major character. Kapadia eschews convention, her metropolis painted in muted colours with... Read more... |
April review - powerfully acted portrait of a conflicted doctor in eastern GeorgiaWednesday, 23 April 2025
It’s easy to see metaphors about the status of modern Georgia, once again threatened by the Russian boot, in its recent artistic output. So while there are no overt political allusions in director Dea Kulumbegashshvili’s April, at its core you sense... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Yojimbo / SanjuroSunday, 06 April 2025
Akira Kurosawa described his 1961 hit Yojimbo as a tale of “rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad… we are weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between the evils”. Toshiro Mifune’s nameless rōnin pitches up a... Read more... |
Blu-ray: High and LowTuesday, 11 February 2025
Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of different genres is a given and one of High and Low’s strengths is a seamless blending of various styles within a single film. Though highly rated by Japanese critics, this 1963 adaptation of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct... Read more... |
Oedipus, Old Vic review - disappointing leads in a production of two halvesThursday, 06 February 2025
The opening scene of the Old Vic’s Oedipus is dominated by a giant backdrop of a skull-like face, eyes shut and rock-like. It belongs to the actor playing Oedipus, presumably, Rami Malek. This is as near to a close-up of the title character as we... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Stray DogTuesday, 04 February 2025
Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing mistakes and madness. The theft of callow detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune)’s police pistol on a... Read more... |
Best of 2024: Blu-rayThursday, 26 December 2024
Someone told me recently that Netflix subscribers can view just 22 films made before 1980. I've no idea if this is true (please correct me if not), but it’s certainly a reason to continue watching and collecting films on physical discs. Plus, there’... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The Oblong BoxTuesday, 12 November 2024
The Oblong Box is a phantom 1969 follow-up to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, sharing star Vincent Price and much cast and crew, after the brilliant young British director’s OD forced his dismissal days before shooting. It also began... Read more... |
Blu-ray: The OutcastsTuesday, 29 October 2024
This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues... Read more... |
Blu-ray: Michael Powell - Early WorksTuesday, 22 October 2024
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated... Read more... |
Endurance review - the greatest escape, AI-assistedWednesday, 16 October 2024
Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1914 only to be marooned until August 1916, was a failure but a “glorious failure”, in the words of one crew member, the meteorologist Leonard Hussey. It is also perhaps... Read more... |
Timestalker review – she's lost control againFriday, 11 October 2024
Unlike the controversial Netflix show Baby Reindeer, which challenges many of the same attitudes towards sexual harassment, self-delusion, and stalking’s gender bias, Alice Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star does not bill itself as... Read more... |
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