Clearing the docket: Summer 2025

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

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.

More folk horror, old and new

Maura O’Donnell (Mary Ryan) can see beyond the material world in Robert Wynne-Simmons' The Outcasts (1982)

Three recent releases from England explore the survival into the modern world of ancient mystical forces, illustrating different aspects of folk horror. In Daniel Kokotajlo’s Starve Acre (2023) a pagan entity brings tragedy to a family; in Robert Wynne-Simmons’ The Outcasts (1982), villagers in 19th Century Ireland believe a farm girl is a witch: and in Peter Sasdy’s The Stone Tape (1972), scripted by Nigel Kneale, a research team believe they’ve found the mechanism behind hauntings.

Blasts from the past

The joy of B: Sam Katzman’s 1950s horrors

Criterion Blu-ray review: Orson Welles’ The Immortal Story (1968)

Disk discovery: Paul Fejos’ Lonesome (1928) from Criterion

Dino de Laurentiis (1919-2010)

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