Zatoichi, still incomplete

I’ve been a fan of Shintaro Katsu’s series of films about Zatoichi, the blind swordsman, since I came across Home Vision Entertainment’s DVD editions of the first two, The Tale of Zatoichi and The Tale of Zatoichi Continues (both 1962) many years ago in the video department of Winnipeg’s long-gone A&B Sound. I was grabbed […]

Horrors, Old and New

The alien ship in Tobe Hooper's Lifeforce (1985)

Horror has been a staple of movie-making almost since the medium was invented – Georges Melies made Le Manoir du Diable in 1896 – and the genre has at times been suspended between art and exploitation, though perhaps more often slipping to the latter end of that spectrum. In the silent period, horror was dominated […]

Recent Viewing: July 2013

The most recent movie I’ve seen in a theatre is Guillermo Del Toro’s Pacific Rim. I confess I didn’t have high hopes. I’ve always found his big budget mainstream productions far less satisfying than his more personal Spanish films, and the idea of giant robots versus giant monsters sounded like a live-action retread of too […]

Blasts from the past

Early winter viewing, part 1

Criterion Blu-ray review: The Sword of Doom (1966)

Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher (1999): Criterion Blu-ray review

Miscellaneous viewing – Summer 2019

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