Film and DVD

Night Train to Inverness

Gutsy period curo

22 Oct 2009

Directed by oft overlooked British film and TV director Ernest Morris (The Tell-Tale Heart, The Court Martial of Major Keller), this tight, train-bound 1960 thriller has a lot to commend it. When ex-convict Roy Lewis (Norman Wooland) turns up in…

Playing Away

A 1980s sports comedy to transcend racial stereotypes

22 Oct 2009

This is a very welcome reissue of Horace Pressure Ové’s 1987 comedy of race manners. When a West Indian cricket team from Brixton travels to a Suffolk village to play against the local team as the culmination of the village’s Third World Week, racial…

Interview: Wes Craven

As The Last House on the Left remake hits DVD, we talk to the legendary horror director

16 Oct 2009

The Last House on the Left was your first movie, shot in Super 6 and with a very low budget in 1972. How have you changed since then? I would like to think that I have acquired some wisdom along the way … How did the idea of making a remake come…

DVD Round-up: TV/Film soundtracks

16 Oct 2009

Cool just doesn’t quite do the job of summarising the compilation of theme tunes and incidental bits from the Incorporated Television Company’s archive. Even if you’ve never seen the likes of Danger Man, The Saint or Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) – the…

The Holly and the Ivy

50s British melodrama

5 Oct 2009

Although it’s by no means a classic, this British melodrama from 1952 provides an interesting snapshot of domestic life in postwar Blighty. Taking place over Christmas in rural Norfolk, it revolves around a family gathering at the vicarage of the…

DVD Round-up: Horror

The films that want to make you scream

2 Oct 2009

Sexy Killer, Dr Chopper, Mr Halloween, Staunton Hill, Smash Cut, Death of a Ghost Hunter, The Books of Blood, Wasting Away, I Sell the Dead, Rogue

Inside

A rare French gorefest

2 Oct 2009

During the filming of Inside, Béatrice Dalle would hide herself under a hoodie, so upset was she that people would deign to look at her when not looking her best. OK, the character she plays (‘The Woman’) has just had half her face blasted away during…

I Sell the Dead

The horror comedy comes to DVD

2 Oct 2009

First-time writer-director Glenn McQuaid does a pretty good job of invoking the spirit of the camp old Hammer chillers films with this low-budget comedy horror about a pair luckless bodysnatchers. Set in a mist-shrouded backwater of 19th century feckin…

The Second Wind

French thriller

1 Oct 2009

This is the second adaptation of criminal-turned-crime-writer José Giovanni’s novel about an old lag breaking out of prison after a lengthy spell inside only to find the underworld of late 1950s Paris has changed beyond recognition. The first, made by…

Rider on the Rain

16 Sep 2009

(15) 120min (Optimum) Between appearing in supporting roles in all-star Hollywood romps such as The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen throughout the sixties and establishing himself as a star in his own right in brutal thrillers such as The…

The Big Knife

16 Sep 2009

(PG) 107min (Optimum) Movies about Hollywood don’t get more caustic than this. Released in 1955, the year after the final death knell of the studio system, it’s a searing indictment of old Tinseltown made in the style of a film noir. Directed by the…

The Red Baron

16 Sep 2009

(12) 101min (Showboat) The daredevil adventures of the famous First World War flying ace ought to make for an entertaining cinematic romp. Manfred von Richthofen, the young, handsome, aristocrat who terrorised the Allies in his scarlet bi-plane…

The Stranger

16 Sep 2009

(PG) 91min (Optimum) That this 1946 noir was the only Orson Welles film to show profit on release and that it was the director’s least favourite picture might suggest an absence of his signature talent. But while Welles had been pressured into…

DVD box sets roundup - Vera Lynn, Audrey Hepburn, Monty Python

11 Sep 2009

Let’s hear it for the girls. The East Ham-born ‘Forces Sweetheart’ Vera Lynn was not really known for her work in cinema, but such is the power of nostalgia capitalism that here comes The Vera Lynn Collection (Sony) ●● featuring three patriotic wartime…

Amsterdamned

11 Sep 2009

(18) 105 min, Dick Maas’ 1988 Dutch thriller with elements of gory horror has the great merit of not taking itself too seriously as it bops along, and adds to that an admirable visual inventiveness about its striking locales. In it, a wetsuited…

Yellowbeard

11 Sep 2009

(12) 96min (Optimum DVD retail) On paper, Mel Damski’s 1983 comedy has everything going for it. With a cast that includes four of the Monty Python crew, as well as Marty Feldman, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook, Peter Boyle and a host of other comedy…

Dynamic: 01 - The Best of DavidLynch.com

11 Sep 2009

(15) 116 min (Scanbox DVD retail) Watching these sketches and skits that were first shown on David Lynch’s subscription-based website, we might think he is the Francis Bacon of film. In his features Lynch is the master of the tension between…

God Man Dog

23 Aug 2009

(15) 119min (Terracotta Media DVD retail) Now that the multi-strand story is so prominent, we tend to forget that the fine Taiwanese filmmaker Edward Yang was influential in developing its form with his mid-1980s film Terroriser. Compatriot Singing…

The Second Wind

23 Aug 2009

(18) 149min (Optimum DVD retail) A remake of Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1966 film Le deuxième soufflé, veteran journeyman Alain Corneau (Série noire, Tous les matins du monde) remakes this black and white classic with a colour scheme out of Amélie, and…

Hamlet 2

23 Aug 2009

(15) 92min (Momentum DVD rental/retail) Sneaking out on DVD, having failed to secure a cinematic release Steve Coogan and director Andrew The Craft Fleming’s arch and unfunny Hamlet 2 is a laboured addition to the ‘deluded loser’ genre. Coogan plays…

Admiral

23 Aug 2009

(15) 124 min (Metrodome DVD rental/retail) Admiral and family man Kolchak (Konstantin Khabensky) falls deeply in love with the beautiful young Anna (Elizabeta Boyarskaya) while fighting for Russia during World War I. She’s married, he’s married and…

No 3

16 Aug 2009

THRILLER (15) 108min (Third Window DVD retail) In one scene in this Korean gangster movie we’re introduced to a character called Ashtray, aptly named for the way he will open up someone’s head with this clearly hazardous object. Whether it is the…

The Sorrow and The Pity

16 Aug 2009

(E) 249min (Arrow DVD retail) Sometimes it takes a foreigner to uncover the secret and lies at the heart of any community. Frankfurt born filmmaker Marcel Orphuls did exactly that to the people of Clermont-Ferrand in France in this his 1969…

Herostratus

16 Aug 2009

(15) 142min (BFI Blu-ray & DVD retail) Don Levy’s criminally overlooked 1967 media satire predates Sidney Lumet’s thematically comparable Network by ten years. When subversive young poet Max (Michael Gothard) hires an advertising company to turn…

Bargain DVDs

12 Aug 2009

Inglorious Bastards, Pirates of the Caribbean, Rocky, Planet of the Apes, Die Hard, Dollars trilogy, Powell and Pressburger anthology, Watchmen, Let The Right One In, O Lucky Man!, Repo Man, Harold and Maude, Donnie Darko