DVD/Blu-Ray Review
DVD Review: Manakamana
If you take the cable car up to The Manakamana Temple in Nepal, it will take you eleven minutes. I know this because in Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez’s film Manakamana we repeat the journey up and down the mountainside. Filmed under the patronage of the Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, whose 2012 documentary Leviathan was …
DVD Review: The Way He Looks
There have been many coming of age films over the years, with the best ones often approaching the subject from a particular angle. The magnificent We Are The Best did it through punk music. The Virgin Suicides addressed the topic through a mystery. Whilst 10 Things I Hate About You used Shakespeare as its muse. …
DVD Review: In Order of Disappearance
Stellan Skarsgård is one of a handful of actors from non-English speaking countries to forge a long term career in Hollywood over the last couple of decades. Parts in The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo, Avengers Assemble, Thor and Railway Man have seen him become a familiar face to many. However, it was leading roles …
DVD Review: The Haunting Of Black Wood
I’ll open this review with a confession: Apart from confusing snatches whilst trying to eat my tea, I’ve never seen Lost. That said, I do enjoy something a bit different. I really enjoyed Josh Whedon’s The Cabin in the Woods and love watching something that’s a bit off the beaten track. Whilst The Haunting Of …
DVD Review: Wish I Was Here
During the last decade, Scrubs became something of a TV phenomenon. The adventures of JD (Zach Braff) and Turk (Donald Faison) had a large following rapt to Channel 4 and their associated channels. It turned into a kind of a post work ritual in the house I was living in at the time. During the …
DVD Review: Greatful Dead
Japanese cinema has brought us many mentally unhinged protagonists over the last few decades. Whilst Nao Ômori became iconic as Ichi The Killer, and director Takashi Miike has continued to be fascinated by sociopaths and psychopaths, it’s often female characters who have a longer-lasting effect. Leading ladies and female killers have been a prevalent since …
DVD Review: The Circle
The time proceeding and during the Second World War was a particularly difficult period in history to be gay. With the rise of Nazi Germany and historical prejudices, homosexuality was illegal in much of Western Europe. Switzerland seemed like a safe haven in an increasingly dark world, where people could, to a certain extent, be …
DVD Review: The Search For Weng Weng
In documentary cinema, it’s not unusual to find that life is stranger than fiction. Some stories would be considered unrealistic were they to be the plot of a narrative film. It’s also the territory of those who are strangely compelled by a chance occurrence to spend years of their lives trying to solve a mystery. …
DVD Review: Two For The Road (Masters of Cinema)
Two of the most iconic actors of the 1950s and 1960s were Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney. Whilst Hepburn is synonymous with the glamour of Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Roman Holiday and Charade. Finney made his name in the kitchen sink dramas Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. In Stanley Donen’s Two For The Road, they play …
DVD Review: The Lady Vanishes & The Man Who Knew Too Much
Alfred Hitchcock is universally accepted as one of the greatest film makers of all time. Whilst most of his best-known work comes from his Hollywood years, “The Master of Suspense” made many films before crossing the pond in the late 1930s. Of his later work, Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds and …