A ★★ review of Dracula (2025)

Early in his career, when he was at the vanguard of the "cinema du look" non-movement of young French directors with slick visual styles, Luc Besson had a certain something about his work. It was influenced by Hollywood, but it had a strain of poetry in it, some weirdness and ambition that gave it a frisson. Genre cinema with some French flavour. Once he became a Mogul, producing hugely successful identikit action thrillers in Europe in an American mode, something changed. As a director, he struggled for a big international hit in the 2000s and it was 2014's Lucy that

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A ★★★★ review of Passport to Pimlico (1949)

Maybe the outright funniest Ealing comedy, this is a gag machine with a peppy energy and a nose for just how far to push its Post-War satire of British bureaucracy and the strangeness of London life four years after the end of the War. A brilliant ensemble cast bring a crowd of vivid comic characters to life, and a real wonder is how none of them is really a caricature; somehow this contains a non-patronising, non-cartoonish portrayal of the working class alongside everything else. Cornelius' direction is smooth and effortless - the early shot following the newspaper down into the

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A ★★★★ review of The Specialists (1969)

Corbucci's take on a "baguette Western" is a typically dark, gritty and political variation on many of the usual Euro-western tropes. He had professed himself "bored" of the genre and that might explain why the script here shoots off in so many directions. There is Hud's revenge story; the story of the money everyone is after and some of the town of Blackstone's awful, corrupt population must be hiding; the proud sheriff struggling to keep his town gun-free; the bunch of hippies hanging around the edges of the narrative; and the looming Mexican gang led by one-armed El Diablo. These

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Lloyd Cole and the Commotions - Rattlesnakes

YouTube video by LloydColeVEVO

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A ★★★ review of Lost Hearts (1973)

The worst of Clark's 1970s adaptations of MR James for the BBC, this is still an atmospheric and at times downright chilling little film. It's best in the first half, when the scares are out of the corner of the eye, then even more so when they are two spectres standing in the distance, slightly unclear in the gloaming. Their final full reveal is a scene almost shocking in its frank horror as the ghosts climb the stairs to the protagonists room and awaken him by playing a hurdy gurdy, all of it captured without bombast or artfulness by Clark's

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A ★★★★ review of Classic Albums: Steely Dan - Aja (1999)

Like all the Classic albums series, this sticks to the formula of talking heads, library clips, voiceover and photo montages, live performances, and the tunes. But none of those other films have the gift that is cool geeks Becker and Fagan sat at a console, sardonically listening to their own record and slagging off more or less everything in that deadpan way. This after the whole thing reveals how they burned through endless session musicians in search of perfection. The bit where they listen to a load of incredible guitar solos that they rejected is pretty hilarious. That they sorta

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All Things Must Pass (Demo)

YouTube video by The Beatles - Topic

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Manhunter, 1986 - ★★★★★

Watched on a big screen a few days back. The only Mann I had not seen in a cinema. Holy fucking shit. The abstract establishing shots, best exemplified by the opening with the buzz of synths as your eyes try to work out what you’re looking at. The use of architecture. Peterson's soulfulness. Noonan's anguish. Farina smirking. The flights of poetic fantasy, which Mann avoided after this except for that celebrated moment in the Insider.Rarely is procedural material quite so gripping as the whole sequence with the note in Lecktor’s cell. You can feel Mann’s love for it."Have you ever seen blood in the moonlight, Will. It appears quite black." Spinotti.Just incredible.

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A ★★ review of Ator, the Fighting Eagle (1982)

Pretty bad, almost perfectly archetypal example of the wave of Italian Conan knockoffs that replaced spaghetti westerns as an important genre in that country's cinema in the early '80s. This has the usual plot including tropes like the Evil megalomaniacal emperor (Dakar, sharing most of his scenes with a pair of tarantulas he chats away to), the massacre of the village to give the hero a mission of revenge, the training to be a badass and the episodic middle section where he encounters a few side-quests here including a tribe of amazons (among them the spectacular Sabrina Siani, the main

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A ★★ review of Fackham Hall (2025)

This kind of thing needs a better hit rate for gags than this manages - there is probably a bit too much effort put into the silly plot and characters, but teh cast are very game, some of the sight gags are great, and there are big laughs here. Mostly jokes about class, sex and quite a few "Don't call me Shirley" type lines.

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A ★★★½ review of Glory (1989)

The representation is problematic by modern standards (as some of the more annoying reviews on here ably demonstrate) but this is a pretty sturdy Oscar Bait historical war movie. It has a nicely epic feel with a clutch of great performances (Freeman, Braugher, Elwes) and a miscast Broderick somehow making it work even in scenes with the electric charisma of young Denzel, who is astonishing here. The big battle scenes when they come are spectacular and bruising, teh climax manages to be both a celebration of heroism and an elegy to teh waste of war. Lovely cinematography, score. Zwick never

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A ★★★½ review of Glory (1989)

The representation is problematic by modern standards (as some of the more annoying reviews on here ably demonstrate) but this is a pretty sturdy Oscar Bait historical war movie. It has a nicely epic feel with a clutch of great performances (Freeman, Braugher, Elwes) and a miscast Broderick somehow making it work even in scenes with the electric charisma of young Denzel, who is astonishing here. The big battle scenes when they come are spectacular and bruising, teh climax manages to be both a celebration of heroism and an elegy to teh waste of war. Lovely cinematography, score. Zwick never

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A ★★★★ review of Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at The Lowry (2024)

National treasure. He would take that and turn it into a 20 minute gag with a meta query on the meaning of the term national treasure, a few allusions to just-obscure-enough pop culture, a funny accent and/or voice he gave to the person saying "National treasure", a genius set up and call back you never see coming, and a diss to a celebrated UK comedian of stage or screen. And I would love every minute. The only negative is that watching him now makes me feel very old because I used to watch Lee and Herring in the 1990s. Oof.

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A ★★★★ review of Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at The Lowry (2024)

National treasure. He would take that and turn it into a 20 minute gag with a meta query on the meaning of the term national treasure, a few allusions to just-obscure-enough pop culture, a funny accent and/or voice he gave to the person saying "National treasure", a genius set up and call back you never see coming, and a diss to a celebrated UK comedian of stage or screen. And I would love every minute. The only negative is that watching him now makes me feel very old because I used to watch Lee and Herring in the 1990s. Oof.

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A ★★★½ review of The Peacemaker (1997)

I really loved this in 1997, and rewatching it I remembered how different it feels from most Clancy/Bond action espionage thrillers of that era: it has huge stakes (stolen nukes) but keeps its focus intimate and low-key, following Kidman's in-at-the-deep-end academic and Clooney's none-more-smug military attache as they chase the weapons across Europe and back to the USA. The issue with it is that their characters are a bit vague (Kidman, who does well to give her some pluck amidst all her reacting) and a collection of actorly tics (Clooney, his ever ER habit on display) tied to a conceited

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A ★★★ review of The Three Kings (2020)

Director Owen understands that talking heads in a documentary are generally incredibly boring, and he also avoids the modern doc tropes of continual done footage. Instead, he seems to have taken more of a Ken Burns approach, with a polyphonic oral history and a kaleidoscope of archive footage crisscrossing between the lives of three young men from the pits of Ayrshire who would define (arguably) the three biggest football clubs in Britain far into the 21st century. The material is rich: the social changes of the '60s and '70s, a sudden burst of colour in the match footage, the growth

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Wichita Lineman (Remastered 2001)

YouTube video by Glen Campbell - Topic

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A ★★★★ review of Hope (2026)

This plays like somebody gave Na Hong-jin the assignment: make a Michael Bay movie, but do it your way. So it is a frankly batshit Korean monster movie with so much to love amidst the extreme oddness of much of it. The beautiful wide angle vistas and streets flying by at speed during the many white-knuckle chases are ace, and it manages to make a good half dozen of those sequences genuinely tense and gripping. The way it continually undercuts the idea of heroism: its protagonists are all bumbling idiots, resolutely human, refreshingly without an emotional arc between them. The

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A ★★★★ review of Black Angel (1980)

This beautiful fantasy short was screened before the Empire Strikes Back in cinemas in 1980. It was written and directed by Roger Christian (who would go on to have a strange journeyman career), who was art director on Star Wars and Alien. That visual acumen is evident in the look he and legendary DP Roger Pratt give this: twilight and autumnal, it gives the Scottish locations a bleak beauty that emphasises the ideas of a knight returning from the Crusades to find his homeland desolate and ruined by invaders and plague. The rhythms are steady and patient, the textures sharp

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A ★★★½ review of All Night Long (1962)

Patrick McGoohan is such a perfect bit of casting for Iago that it is a bit spooky. In this movie, which takes Othello and puts it in the single-set of a London Jazz party in an unfeasibly huge and cool warehouse loft, he plays Jazz drummer Johnny Cousin. Surrounded by beautiful and talented people who trade riffs verbally and musically and seem very laissez faire and free and easy, his hyper-intense twitchiness just barely hidden behind a jovial exterior gives him the vibe of a shark in a gold fish bowl. That is to say, he is incredible here, making

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