Sorted by date / most viewed. Showing 10, 25, 50, 100 per page.
18 Sep 2008
DRAMA (PG) 107min (ICA DVD retail) *** Mamo (Ishmail Ghaffari), a brusque Kurdish musician living in Iran has spent months trying to arrange a permit for one final concert in Kurdish Iraq. When this is resolved, his problems really start. He…
International interest in the sciences may have been piqued by the recent, less-exciting-than-it sounds Big Bang experiment but let’s face it – the most important question is: ‘If time and space are curved, where do all of the straight people come…
DVD (18) 112min (BFI DVD retail) Pier Paolo Pasolini’s loose 1975 adaptation of the Marquis De Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom gets an excellent two disc DVD (and Blu-ray) makeover with a ton of fantastic extras. Pasolini transposed De Sade’s tale…
DRAMA (15) 109min (BFI DVD retail) Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke (Platform, Unknown Pleasures) hails from the tradition of Asian long-take, observational masters that include Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, but Zhang-ke’s work often has a…
COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 88min (Bluebell DVD retail) *** Written by and starring Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki and directed by his brother Mika, The Liar is an early 1980s monochrome mood piece with the nouvelle vague echoing in the distance. One critic…
HORROR (18) 104min (Showbox DVD retail) Young archaeologist (Gina Philips) finds her research into London’s great plague of 1665 barred when public health officials reveal that the former orphanage she is excavating still contains plague.
21 Aug 2008
DRAMA Still looking good 40 years on, this bawdy, witty chamber piece confined within a medieval French chateau revolves around King Henry II’s obsession with choosing an heir to his throne, and the efforts of his scheming wife Eleanor of Aquitaine…
COMEDY Mel Brooks’ classic and surely – with full respect to High Anxiety and Blazing Saddles – his greatest film still stands up brilliantly forty years on. For those unfamiliar with its plot, we meet a rapacious Broadway producer (Zero Mostel) and…
CRIME/DRAMA ‘A little bit of everybody belongs in hell’ say Kris Kristofferson’s former cop, a man who’s recently served time for killing a mobster. Then there is Keith Carradine’s man on the make who changes his image from country boy to androgynous…
DRAMA/ROMANCE This piece from former documentary maker Philippe Aractingi speaks loudly of his own artistic origins in reportage. In it, a mother returns to Lebanon at the end of the Lebanese-Israeli war of 2006 in order to find her son, who has…
14 Aug 2008
DOCUMENTARY (E) 91min (Warner Home Video DVD retail) The second Maysles brothers documentary to be given a new lease of life on DVD in so many months, Gimme Shelter is by far their most contentious film, and arguably the most tragic film ever made…
DOCUMENTARY (E) 91min (Eureka DVD retail) The first of two recent DVD debuts for seminal documentaries made by the Maysles brothers, Salesman is the non-narrated account of four Boston door-to-door bible sellers. Made in 1968 and shot in black and…
DRAMA/FANTASY (12A) 118min (Second Run DVD retail) Thai architect, artist, writer and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul has made a handful of experimental documentaries and fictional films that are so wayward and quirky in structure that they…
7 Aug 2008
THRILLER (PG) 91min (Blackhorse DVD retail) Otto Preminger’s complex and clever 1952 film noir about how salt of the earth ambulance driver Frank (Robert Mitchum) becomes mixed up with femme fatale Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) is certainly something…
SHORTS (15) 100min (PIAS DVD retail) Cottoning on to the fact that in the future the best film festivals will probably take place online and from the comfort of our own homes, those good people at Raindance have put together a best of DVD. The…
ACTION (15) 108min (Momentum DVD retail/rental) Never Back Down isn’t meant for high analysis, it’s basically a film of hot young teens punching each other. The plot to string these acts of violence together is so basic it hardly warrants a mention…
31 Jul 2008
THRILLER (PG) 110min (ICA DVD retail) Veteran French filmmaker Claude Chabrol takes on the story of magistrate Eva Joly’s ceaseless investigation into France’s leading oil company Elf Aquitaine. The inquiry led to a national scandal in 1994 which The…
SCI-FI/ADVENTURE (PG) 106min (Optimum DVD retail) Given director Mike Hodges once admitted to an Edinburgh International Film Festival audience that his 1980 blockbuster version of Alex Raymond’s comic strip was made up as he went along, it’s all the…
If Norma Desmond believed that pictures were getting smaller, then the same can be said for the industry. Smaller by one distributor. After 26 years, Tartan Films has ceased to be. The home to many cutting-edge, independent and foreign-language films…
DRAMA (PG) 81min (BFI DVD retail) Following on from the recent releases of The Terence Davies Trilogy and Distant Voices, Still Life comes the arrival on DVD of what Davies loosely described as the third and final part of an autobiographical series of…
17 Jul 2008
Intended to fill the gaps between Batman Begins and Dark Knight, Gotham Knights offers us six animated shorts, much in the same way as The Animatrix did for The Matrix. Each story is self-contained and created by a different writer (including Greg…
HORROR COMEDY (15) 88min (Nucleus DVD retail) Out of print for over 20 years, Kenny Everett’s one and only feature film has been unearthed. This horror spoof features a group of monks bumping off anyone who dares enter Headstone Manor, and stars…
THRILLER (18) 86min (Revolver DVD retail/rental) This is an interestingly shot, tense and to the point thriller, which belies its opening sequence in which a girl is sadistically tortured in the familiar tradition of Hostel or Saw to become a…
HORROR THE GRAVEYARD (18) 83min (Revolver DVD retail/rental) Michael Hurst’s horror film by numbers harks back very ineffectively to the three-decade-old genre conventions of Friday the 13th and Halloween. A prologue depicts a group of college…
3 Jul 2008
The time has come to celebrate British cinema. Not the British cinema of Hitchcock, Powell and Pressburger, David Lean or Robin The Wicker Man Hardy, but the cinema of subsidies and struggle, the results of which have barely seen the inside of a cinema…
ROAD MOVIE (15) 111min (Scanbox DVD retail) Subtitled ‘Episodes of the Road’, this plays more like an edited version of a primetime US television comedy aimed at teenagers. Written and directed by Bob Gale, comic book writer and regular Robert…
WAR (15) 100min (Contender DVD retail) Will the Algerian war turn the humanist lieutenant at the centre of Florent Emilio Siri’s film into a monstrous shadow of his former self? After being posted to Algeria, Terrien (Benoît Magimel), the…
GANGSTER (18) 143min (Momentum DVD retail/rental) This brutally efficient, thoroughly gratuitous French gangster film from Frédéric Schoendorffer, director of Scene de Crime and Spy Bound, explores the lives of various gangsters on the make.
HORROR (18) 83min (Revolver DVD rental/retail) Michael Hurst’s horror-by-numbers film harks back very ineffectively to the three decade old genre conventions of Friday The 13th and Halloween without evoking the slightest hint of the atmosphere. In…
DRAMA (15) 72min (Peccadillo DVD retail) In one particular scene of this film, a good looking thirty-something notices that he’s been trailed by a couple of ladies, and comments that it’s the first time he’s been cruised by two gay women, and that…
22 May 2008
POETRY DVD/BOOK (Bloodaxe) Tucked inside the book of the same name comes a smart pair of DVDs which platform the depth and range which poetry publisher Bloodaxe have been offering us for three decades. In Person is a celebration of the intimacy that…
ROMANCE/DRAMA (15) 90min (BFI) Made immediately after his boisterous Scottish historical romp Sinful Davey, this long lost, now cult, 1969 film was a much more personal project for the great John Huston. Based on Dutch writer Hans Koningsberger’s…
DRAMA (18) 115min (Metrodome) Made in 1994 Shekhar Kapur’s (Elizabeth) brutal retelling of the true story of Phoolan Devi, India’s only modern day female outlaw is still a compellingly tough watch. Jailed in 1983 and released in the year Bandit…
SATIRE (PG) 100min (BFI) Ernst Lubitsch’s famous lightness of touch is all over the final film completed by the master of sophisticated wit and classy style. Having skewered American society with a series of punchy Hollywood romantic comedies such as…
MYTH/ROMANCE (12) 100min (Yume) This potentially fascinating attempt to combine two mythologies: ancient Chinese martial arts with Finnish legend, The Kalevala is, as the blurb tell us, ‘the first ever Finnish martial arts film’. May it also be the…
ROMANCE/DRAMA (15) 79mins (Revolver) Although a big name now, Vin Diesel couldn’t get work before this film was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize in Sundance back in 1997. Written, directed and produced by the man of muscle himself, this is half…
8 May 2008
THRILLER (PG) 95min (Eureka) Having failed to turn a profit on either Citizen Kane or its follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles directed this relatively conventional film noir for RKO in 1946. In the process, he proved to the studio that…
COMEDY/SATIRE (15) 169min (Warner Home Video) Lindsay Anderson’s 1973 masterpiece is long overdue a proper DVD release, particularly since it’s rarely shown on our television or cinema screens. In O Lucky Man!, Clockwork Orange star Malcolm McDowell…
Not only does Land of Promise: The British Documentary Movement 1930-1950 (BFI) •••• provide fascinating insights into a bygone age, this four-disc collection of 40 films totalling 13 hours of viewing also showcases the groundbreaking talent of the…
TRUE CRIME (15) 99min (Metrodome) Robert Scarfies Sarkies’ drama based on a real life massacre that occurred in a small New Zealand seaside village, begins with a deceptively gentle and elegiac portrayal of small town life, before its explosion of…
DRAMA (PG) 86min (Optimum) This is the debut feature from Robert Hamer, the talented but troubled (by the bottle) filmmaker who went on to make the superb Kind Hearts and Coronets and terrific School for Scoundrels. Having contributed a segment of the…
THEATRE ADAPTATION (15) 104min (Metrodome) The vexed issue of how to turn stage plays into cinema has haunted the movies for as long as the technology to make film has existed. This 1983 attempt by Robert Altman to film David Rabe’s noted mid-70s…
24 Apr 2008
PROFILE Suzanne Black considers the work of one of Queer cinema’s great auteurs as two of his key films are released on DVD Gus Van Sant is one of a handful of directors to have crossed from arthouse credibility to mainstream pennies and back again.
Horror has to be one of the most prolific genres, particularly on the direct to DVD market, so as per usual there’s plenty to get through this issue. For the true aficionado Mother of Tears (Optimum) ••• (pictured) is the sequel you’ve been waiting 28…
DRAMA (U) 69min (Freemantle DVD rental/retail) Coming in at just over an hour, this is a film that can be found in different versions (another one goes under the title of Terminal Station). This one’s strength lies in another of Montgomery Clift’s…
SILENT SERIES (PG) 339min (Artificial Eye DVD retail) Times of crisis are often also eras of escapism; yet the forms of art produced in such periods often unconsciously reflect the very crises we seek to escape. This is certainly the case in Louis…
DVD (12) 80 mins (Lionsgate) The new big budget feature isn’t the first Iron Man movie as this 2007 animated feature from Marvel proves. The film revisits Iron Man’s first showdown with the Mandarin. The animation is fine but overall the film…
PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER (15) 99mins (Optimum DVD retail/rental) For his varied pedigree alone, screenwriter John August’s debut feature is a worthy curiosity. Having written Doug Liman’s Go, both Charlie’s Angels instalments and three films by Tim…
HORROR (18) 113 min (Icon Home Entertainment) While comparisons to Katherine Bigelow’s classic Near Dark might be a little exaggerated there are certainly some nicely built moments in David Slade’s vampire flick based on Ben Templesmith and Steve…
10 Apr 2008
DOCUMENTARY (15) 98min (Contender DVD retail) A strange amalgam of fiction film devices and impressive access, Donal MacIntyre’s look at the life of infamous Manchester gangster Dominic Noonan is compelling viewing. As he follows the Noonan crime…
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