BFI
Graham Rickson
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’s the bonus features, booklet notes, commentaries and deleted scenes, all things which you won’t find on streaming services. Here’s my pick of the year’s Blu-ray releases, in no particular order:Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh (Second Run) is an eye-popping Egyptian epic from 1966. Filmed mostly in the deserts of Uzbekistan with scores of Soviet Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 replacement Gordon Hessler and co-writer Christopher Wicking’s own Price-starring horror sequence, notably the bizarre, Mod anti-fascist Scream and Scream Again (1970), placing this obscure film at a packed cult crossroads.Witchfinder General’s savage account of Matthew Hopkins’ 17th century East Anglian rampage had been dragooned into AIP’s Poe-Price cycle Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 on his sole directorial feature’s Blu-ray debut that it isn’t folk horror at all, simply an Irish folk tale in pre-Famine days “when magic had a value”.The Outcasts (1982) is earthed in the boggy mud and lush green of West Ireland, where innocent Maura (Mary Ryan) is bullied by her siblings in a stone home seemingly pulled from the ground. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
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 love for his exile’s home.These five minor, pre-Archers films don’t fairly define Powell’s role – his elemental, important The Edge of the World (1937) also predates British cinema’s equivalent of Lennon meeting McCartney. Mostly made as subsidised, cheap native “quota quickies”, they show an apprentice director’s vigorous cinematic fluency and Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
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 the greatest survival story ever told.In a legendary feat of perseverance, Shackleton kept a crew of 30 men alive for almost two years in brutal conditions – and on a diet of penguins, seals, and their own sledge dogs – after his ship, Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and sank in the Weddell Sea.“I have marvelled often at the thin line that Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
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 a true story.Quite the opposite, in fact. Timestalker is totally – and delightfully – bonkers right from its first scene, set in 1688 against a backdrop of the Scottish Covenanter uprising, where Agnes, a dowdy spinster (played by Lowe herself and introduced, literally, at a spinning wheel) falls headlong in love at a public execution, again quite Read more ...
Justine Elias
Before Alice Lowe wrote her first short film scripts, she was, despite success in television and theater, “terrified” of making a full-length feature. “I thought it was some untouchable Holy Grail. That you have to be somehow inducted before you’re allowed to breathe the word ‘film'." She's not terrified these days. Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star, is a fully realised passion project in every sense.In the history-hopping romantic comedy-thriller, Lowe portrays an obsessed heroine in pursuit of her dream lover – whether he cares or not. From the Stone Age and Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (To Live) begins with an X-ray photo of the central character’s cancer-ridden stomach, a man described by the narrator (an uncredited Kurosawa) as someone “drifting through life… we can’t say that he is really alive at all…”.It’s an audacious opening, and what promises to be a small-scale personal drama soon expands and takes on epic dimensions. Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura is perfectly cast as Kanji Watanabe, a low-ranking civil servant in a Tokyo town hall who’s spent 30 years "drifting through life" surrounded by colleagues who specialise in passing the buck. In Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Once regarded as highly as Kurosawa and Ozu, Japanese director Mikio Naruse’s star has fallen in recent decades, with few of his films readily available in the West. I’d suggest reading Hayley Scanlon’s concise introduction to Naruse’s work on the BFI website as a prelude to watching this restored print of Floating Clouds. Scanlon describes him as "cinema’s greatest pessimist", something that’s hard to disagree with on the basis of this work alone.Floating Clouds, released in 1955, is a dark love story set in the ruins of post-war Tokyo. Hideko Takamine’s Yukiko returns from working in an Read more ...
Graham Rickson
Discussing 1971’s The Music Lovers with writer John Baxter, director Ken Russell suggested, among other things, that “music and facts don’t mix”. They don’t always line up here, but this film does stand up as a worthy successor to the BBC’s Delius: Song of Summer and Dance of the Seven Veils, the latter deemed so offensive by the Strauss estate that it remained unseen for 50 years.There’s plenty to offend in Russell’s lurid, starrily cast Tchaikovsky biopic but its assertive audacity worked for me. Discovering the composer’s Piano Concerto No. 1 upon leaving the Merchant Navy in the early Read more ...
Graham Fuller
As Janis Pugh’s semi-autobiographical Chuck Chuck Baby draws to a close, the camera fondly plays around the smiling faces of some of its voiceless female characters – careworn middle-aged workers in a Welsh chicken processing factory. They're cheered by finally seeing something good happen to one of their number. It’s the romantic musical drama’s most loving visual aside – the poultry packers’ ingrained pain and disappointment momentarily forgotten.The woman in question is Helen (Louise Brealey), at the start a near-broken drudge, pushing 40 and consigned to domestic misery, her only Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
In Marie Amachoukeli’s Àma Gloria there’s a remarkable performance by a child actor, Louise Mauroy-Panzani. So key is her contribution that It’s fair to say the director couldn’t have delivered the film she had planned without her,.Mauroy-Panzani plays six-year-old Cléo, who lives in Paris with her widowed father (Arnaud Rebotini, pictured below with Mauroy-Panzani) in the care of Gloria, who, like the actress playing her, Ilça Moreno, is a nanny from the Cape Verde islands. And Cléo, very like the director herself, is short-sighted and already wears glasses. But Amachoukeli turns Read more ...