Masters of Cinema
Blu-Ray Review: Man Without a Star
After his big breakthrough in boxing drama Champion at the end of the 1940s, Kirk Douglas spent the next decade at the top of his game. One of the biggest film stars in the world and hot Hollywood property. By 1955, he had broken away from Warner Brother, establishing his own production company; Bryna Productions. …
Blu-Ray Review: Running Out of Time 1 & 2
The character actor is the unheralded star of the cinematic universe. Those familiar faces which regularly pop up randomly in a film and make everything better. Suet Lam fits squarely into this category. In a career spanning over two hundred films, so far, he’s worked regularly with the likes of Stephen Chow and Johnnie To. …
Blu-Ray Review: Execution in Autumn
Lee Hsing sadly passed away last year at the ripe old age of 91. The godfather of Taiwanese cinema made over thirty films in a career spanning over four decades. As well as being popular with audiences in his homeland, he was nominated for, and won, a number of awards at the national Golden Horse …
Blu-Ray Review: Vampyr
Today’s modern horror films, especially those which make it into multiplexes, tend to be full of flashy effects and polished to within an inch of their lives. Often featuring a score that is so obtrusive you’ll possibly want to tear your head off. It hasn’t always been this way and much of the output coming …
Blu-Ray Review: The Indian Tomb
We live in a world which is now almost devoid of mystery, and it’s not a better place for it. Gone are the days when people who were fascinated by the exotic and the mythical had to feed their obsessions vicariously, through reports from adventurers such as Marco Polo. There was a time when Europeans …
Blu-Ray Review: The Sun Shines Bright
John Ford was undoubtedly on of the greatest American directors of his generation. Over the course of six decades, he made well over one hundred films. Starting his career in the silent era and ending it during the 1960s. Making a number of iconic westerns, such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, My Darling Clementine and The …
Blu-Ray Review: The Love of Jeanne Ney
While the silent era planted the foundation stones for a global film industry which is now worth countless billions, it feels like it’s often dismissed as merely a genre in conversation. When in fact it was cinema, in all its entirety and diversity. The Weimar Republic played host to some of the most influential directors …
Blu-Ray Review: Champion
Boxing is one sport which punches well above its weight when it comes to popularity and media attention. Indeed, the amount of money to be made, primarily for uneducated young men, has made it a way out of poverty and a viable alternative to a life of crime. These factors have also made big box …
Blu-Ray Review: The Great Silence
Whilst most actors today seem to have been through a PR finishing school on how to answer interview questions, that has not always been the case. There was a time when the film industry was full of characters. However, there were few who could match Klaus Kinski when it came to intensity and volatility. While …
Blu-Ray Review: PTU
It makes sense that filmmakers turn to actors they can trust, time and time again. You see it happen a lot in cinema, directors and stars who collaborate frequently over many years. Some of the most famous partnerships have been Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune, François Truffaut with Jean-Pierre Léaud and more recently Martin Scorsese …