According to Lynch, a private screening of his debut film Eraserhead ended with Mel Brooks declaring, ‘You’re a mad man, I love you. You’re in’.
Review by Paul Huckerby

Bertrand Tavernier’s transposition of Jim Thompson’s disillusioned chronicle of Southern corruption to the moral quagmire of colonial Africa was an inspired choice.
Review by Paul Huckerby

Adapted from cult Belgian liberal-baiting novelist Herman Brusselmans’ book, Ex-Drummer is the story of a disabled Ostend punk band who recruit a famous liberal-baiting novelist to be their drummer.
Review by Paul Huckerby

As this box-set shows, by the 1930s Hitchcock was already a master filmmaker. Alongside those Saturday afternoon favourites The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes are some less well-known but equally great films – particularly Young and Innocent and Sabotage – films that are as good as, and often better than his American work.
Review by Paul Huckerby

Although less well-known than some of his compatriots, Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski has built a unique, although little seen, collection of films both in his native Poland and elsewhere. Early in his career he served as a screen writer for both Andrzej Wajda and Roman Polanski (co-writing Knife in the Water) with whom, it could be argued, he shares a certain macabre sensibility.
Review by Paul Huckerby

The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the height of the cold war. So it is hardly surprising that both The Manchurian Candidate and the lesser-known British film The Mind Benders were made that same year. Both films are concerned with brain-washing…
Review by Paul Huckerby

Disillusioned with Hollywood, by 1957 Nicholas Ray was ready to head to Europe where he would go on to make the brilliant Bitter Victory. But before he could leave America behind, he had to make one more film for 20th Century Fox. The studio suggested a remake of Henry King’s Jesse James (1939).
Review by Paul Huckerby

Sam Peckinpah was already an experienced director (and screenwriter) before he came to make his first feature The Deadly Companions in 1961. He had worked extensively in television, usually on Western shows such as Gunsmoke and The Westerner. The Deadly Companions was produced by its star Margaret O’Hara, for whom Peckinpah claims he worked as a hired hand. He was allowed very little input in the writing and thus it lacks his typically strong authorial signature.
Review by Paul Huckerby