After three years of steady releases, for some reason the BFI suspended their Flipside series last May. Now, after an eleven month break, they’ve released two new titles, as unexpected as anything which has come before. In John Krish, they’ve returned to a filmmaker familiar from a number of previous BFI releases, while in B.S. […]
Growing up in England during the late 1950s and early ’60s, my experience of British film was a mix of now-forgotten B-movies, coarse comedies (I loved the Carry On films, which seem all but unwatchable now), and occasional big productions (Zulu remains a vivid childhood memory). Hammer horror was tantalizingly out of reach, restricted to […]
A few days ago I spent the evening with four friends at our annual get-together to discuss what we had seen during the past year. Back when I was first invited to join the group years ago, there would often be heated arguments about the particular merits of this or that movie, but we’ve all […]
Released simultaneously with the Andy Milligan double-bill Nightbirds and The Body Beneath, the BFI Flipside edition of Ian Merrick’s The Black Panther (1977) resurrects an essentially lost British film which suffered a quick death because it took as subject something too raw for British audiences (or at least the British press) to tolerate. Merrick had […]
There’s far more stuff in the world than any of us can ever have complete first-hand knowledge of, so we often have to rely on second- and third-hand information about things we haven’t yet encountered. This leads to a tendency to form opinions about things we actually know nothing about … and judging by a […]
Even with the tens of thousands of movies released on DVD since the format debuted in the late ’90s, vast amounts of film history remain untouched. Of course, home video has always been a commercial enterprise, the preservation and dissemination of history mostly a by-product. Companies with large back-catalogues of titles have been constantly faced […]
When you buy more DVDs than you’ll ever have time to watch (one of the hazards of addiction), you end up with large backlogs piled on various shelves, the sight of which tends to nag at you. Sometimes, you can’t help asking yourself why the hell you bought them in the first place, but of […]
At the height of the Cold War official propaganda was aimed at lulling the population into accepting the idea of nuclear war as somehow normal and “manageable”, as depicted in the Central Office of Information short The Hole in the Ground (1962) which shows no-nonsense bureaucrats getting on with the job of “maintaining order” during an attack on Britain.
Not surprisingly, given the amount of time I spend watching movies at home, I came across quite a few worthwhile titles during the year. I’ve already written about many of these in this blog, so will just offer capsule comments here (in no particular order) about ones that I particularly recommend. Dramatic features The World, […]
Since reading Chris Fujiwara’s book about Jacques Tourneur, The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1998), I’ve been searching out films by the director, particularly ones unconnected with the genres he’s best known for, horror and noir. I recently got hold of a cheap VCI disk featuring a double bill of […]