A unique figure in early American cinema, director Tod Browning is best known for his stupefying Freaks and for his standard-setting Dracula, starring Bela Lugosi. Between 1919 and 1930 he made eleven films with another rather singular Hollywood figure, actor Lon Chaney. Dubbed ‘the man with a thousand faces’ for his mastery of startling make-up effects, Chaney shared with Browning a fascination for the bizarre and the unconventional…
Review by Virginie Sélavy
Although Yasuzo Masumura was a major influence on directors such as Nagisa Oshima and Shohei Imamura, his work has been incomprehensibly neglected in the West. This is a man who was a precursor of the Japanese New Wave and a pioneer of the kind of extreme cinema that has made Takashi Miike famous, a wildly imaginative filmmaker who has no less than 58 films to his credit and is responsible for some of the most savagely beautiful, erotically-charged images ever committed to celluloid, and yet he has been treated until now as little more than a footnote in film history.
Review by Virginie Sélavy
This is one of the early B-movies that Seijun Suzuki made for Nikkatsu studios before he found his stylistic feet with Youth of the Beast in 1963. A rebellious youth tale, it portrays the head-on collision between traditional and modern Japan as young orphan Sadao is revealed to be the long-lost heir to the respectable Matsudaira clan.
Review by Virginie Sélavy
This magnificent 2-disc set more than confirms the reputation of a highly personal (geminal?) body of work. In fact, work like this whose public life is inevitably fleeting, fragile and obscure – all the more so since Channel Four ditched its experimental remit – gains more than most from being collected and presented as an oeuvre.
Review by Stephen Thomson
Inland Empire, David Lynch’s tenth feature, is in many ways a summing-up of his career so far: it has a budget, a look and a sound design that are not that different from his 1977 experimental debut Eraserhead; it stars one of Lynch’s favourite actresses, Laura Dern, who also appeared in Blue Velvet and Wild at Heart; and its plot almost follows on from Mulholland Drive.
Review by Kim Nicolajsen
Greed, desire, frustration and revenge all course through Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film The Family Friend, his follow-up to the captivating The Consequences of Love.
Review by Sarah Cronin
There are so many myths and stories about the film’s troubled production (and after-effects) that it is hard to know what to believe. Did James Fox (Chas) take his performance too far and become involved with real gangsters before becoming a born-again Christian?
Review by Paul Huckerby
A futuristic retelling of Akira Kurosawa’s classic Seven Samurai, Samurai 7 tells the story of the desperate villagers of Kanna who decide to hire samurai to protect them from the bandits who regularly raid their villages.
Review by Virginie Sélavy
Fittingly, and scarily pertinent taking the last decade into consideration, the documentary starts with The House of Un-American Activities Committee, an organisation which clearly should be credited with more than just giving George Clooney the opportunity to make a film with a lot of smoking in it.
Review by CB
The second instalment of Itô’s Female Prisoner series remains a fascinating film that deserves to be rediscovered for its wildly inventive portrayal of an uncommon, gutsy female rebel.
Review by Virginie Sélavy