Directors | Cagey Films

Greg Hanec’s Think at Night (2024)

Posted on July 16, 2025July 15, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

Three decades in the making, Winnipeg musician and filmmaker Greg Hanec’s feature Think at Night (1992-2024) is a challenging work which assaults the viewer with aggressively abrasive sounds and images as an embittered man (played by Hanec) who, for some reason, has given up on art, wanders the city at night, encountering acquaintances whose continuing creative practices he takes as a personal affront. The film’s style reflects and embodies the character’s existential state, confused and angry, before resolving in a moment of contemplative calm.

Clearing the docket: Summer 2025, part two

Posted on July 9, 2025July 6, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

Uncanny life-like puppet Les Hackel sinks into a nightmare of guilt and violence in Evan Marlowe's Abruptio (2023)

Another eclectic selection of movies I’ve watched in the past few months, ranging from a politically nuanced spaghetti western to spectacular action, lush anime, a big-screen travelogue, various horrors from low to relatively high-budget, a charming coming-of-age comedy, a nightmare with uncanny life-sized puppets, and a rediscovered vérité comedy from the late-’60s.

Clearing the docket: Summer 2025

Posted on July 2, 2025July 2, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton)'s conscience torments him when the prospect of wealth becomes a nightmare in Sam Raimi's A Simple Plan (1998)

Recent acquisitions from Arrow and Radiance cover a range of genres from Japanese B-movie crimes to traditional ghost stories, lingering traces of German fascism, a Poe adaptation filtered through pandemic anxieties, a pair of Italian genre movies, and Sam Raimi’s masterful neo-noir A Simple Plan (1998).

British fringe cinema from the BFI

Posted on June 25, 2025June 21, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

The Volunteer (Mary Woodvine) gradually merges with the island in Mark Jenkin's Enys Men (2022)

Four releases from the BFI offer excellent presentations of a pair of features from the 1970s which didn’t leave much of a mark at the time but are well worth rediscovering – Richard Loncraine’s Flame (1975) and Simon Perry’s Eclipse (1977) – and two recent experimental features – Bait (2019), Enys Men (2022) – by Cornish filmmaker Mark Jenkin, which provide a hand-crafted glimpse of disruptive social change in a timeless landscape.

Personal landmark: my 1000th post

Posted on June 18, 2025June 17, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

Ugolin (Rellys)'s guilt turns into romantic obsession in Marcel Pagnol's Manon des Sources (1952)

It’s hard to believe, but this is my 1000th post since I started writing this blog back in October 2010. Not having missed a single week since that first post – and often posting more than once a week – my writing here has been the most sustained activity I’ve ever undertaken. While there’s no doubt an element of ego involved in putting this much personal opinion out into the world, the blog has served something of a self-therapeutic purpose, providing focus and a personal challenge to off-set the tedium of the federal government clerical job I landed after my editing career dried up. Having retired six months ago, I’m finding myself wondering whether the blog has served its purpose and the time has come to look for other creative pursuits.

Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985): Criterion Blu-ray review

Posted on June 11, 2025June 14, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

Office drone Sam Lowry (Jonathan Pryce) has heroic fantasies in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985)

Criterion’s new edition of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil (1985) presents an impressive new 4K restoration which highlights the dense, endlessly inventive production design of Gilliam’s blackly comic dystopian vision of a world run by an oppressive but utterly incompetent bureaucracy, even more pertinent now than it was in the middle of Reagan’s presidency. The three-disk, dual-format set includes a comprehensive history of the production and the controversy surrounding Gilliam’s fight to get the film released, as well as the truly awful alternate “Love Conquers All” cut put together by Universal in a misguided attempt to make the film “more commercial”.

Theatrical viewing, early 2025

Posted on June 4, 2025June 1, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

Paddington leads the Brown family on an adventure in Dougal Wilson's Paddington in Peru (2024)

One of the benefits of retirement is being able to go to weekday matinees, which means seeing movies in almost empty theatres – the best way as far as I’m concerned. So this year I’ve already seen more movies than all of last year or the year before . But that also means I’ve seen a few movies I probably wouldn’t have bothered with before. Among the duds, though, have been some good – or at least interesting – movies I’m glad I saw on a big screen.

British archive television from Network

Posted on May 31, 2025June 1, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

Colonel Waley (Alfred Burke) enforces conservative traditions in the exclusive Hunters Club in Nigel Kneale's Ladies' Night (Herbert Wise, 1986)

A pair of DVDs from the now-defunct Network Releasing unearth forgotten artefacts from British television history; The Frighteners, an anthology of concise half-hour psychological thrillers from 1972-73, and three one-hour dramas displaying the range of the influential writer Nigel Kneale – The Crunch (Michael Elliott, 1964), a political thrillers, Ladies’ Night (Herbert Wise, 1986), a satirical comedy about a conservative establishment crumbling in the face of feminism, and Gentry (Roy Battersby, 1987), in which a bourgeois couple cashing in the decline of an East End community are confronted by the anger of those being displaced.

The mind-bending paradox of Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007)

Posted on May 28, 2025May 28, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

The identity of the menacing man in the woods comes as a surprise in Nacho Vigalondo's Timecrimes (2007)

Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007) is one of the best – and most mind-bending – time travel paradox movies, a rigorous, darkly comic puzzle in which cause and effect are twisted in knots as a middle-class man finds his identity fragmented by repeated short jumps in time.

The destructive power of fragile masculinity: Terence Fisher’s Four Sided Triangle (1953)

Posted on May 21, 2025May 17, 2025 by Kenneth George Godwin

Bill (Stephen Murray) is so tightly focused on his research that he becomes blind to consequences in Terence Fisher's Four Sided Triangle (1953)

In 1953 Hammer Films took the first step on a path which would soon give the company an international reputation as a key purveyor of horror movies. Terence Fisher’s Four Sided Triangle, a modest production which combined science fiction, psychological horror and romantic melodrama in a prosaic English village setting laid the groundwork which would lead two year later to Val Guest’s The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), and two more years beyond that to Terence Fisher’s The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), the movie which changed the course of modern horror cinema. Hammer’s 4K restoration of Four Sided Triangle will hopefully dispel the film’s rather low reputation, with a beautiful new transfer, two commentaries and three interview featurettes which argue for its value as a pioneering contribution to British genre cinema.

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