The James Marsh film review archive

Blu-ray

  • The Naked Island

    Masters of Cinema just released Shindo Kaneto’s wonderfully poetic film on Blu-ray in the UK, a modern silent with almost no discernible dialogue, but an incredibly powerful narrative nonetheless about… Read More

  • Daleks Invasion Earth 2150 AD

    Made right off the back of Doctor Who and the Daleks‘ success, Peter Cushing reprises his role as the affable time traveller, who this time stays on Earth, albeit nearly… Read More

  • Bullhead

    I have been a huge champion of this film since first catching it at PiFan back in 2011. Michael R. Roskam’s directorial debut is a powerful crime epic, set in… Read More

  • Doctor Who and the Daleks

    This rather quaint soft-hearted approach to the beloved timelord sees Peter Cushing portray a human version of the time travelling space adventurer, who brings along his niece, granddaughter and the… Read More

  • The Decameron

    I continue my sporadic exploration of the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini with this first part of his Trilogy of Life. Lighter in tone yet no less subversive than the… Read More

  • Miami Connection

    As someone with tenuous associations to the Alamo Drafthouse, I am somewhat ashamed that it has taken me this long to watch the flagship release of their Drafthouse Films label.… Read More

  • Medium Cool

    Can’t say that I was especially blown away by Haskell Wexler’s docudrama that follows Robert Forster’s Chicago TV cameraman as he surveys the turbulent climate that builds to the 1968… Read More

  • Our Day Will Come

    The debut feature from Romain Gavras is an angry, visually arresting drama starring Vincent Cassel and Olivier Barthelemy as frustrated, victimised red heads whose lives collide, and they head out… Read More

  • Demons 2

    I recently picked up Arrow Video’s double pack of Lamberto Bava’s Demons, which also included the sequel. I had not seen either film before, but this second entry seemed to… Read More

  • Deadly Blessing

    Early horror offering from Wes Craven, that arrives after his grungy and controversial thrillers, like The Last House on the Left and The Hills Have Eyes but before he found… Read More

  • Rashomon

    My favourite Kurosawa film, and quite possibly my favourite Asian film of all-time, this masterful morality play changed the language of cinema forever. Its revelation that narrators, performances, even the… Read More

  • King of New York

    Just revisited Abel Ferrara’s crime epic for the first time in over a decade – and it’s still brilliant. Read More

  • REVIEW: King of New York

    Abel Ferrara’s King of New York was a milestone film for me in many ways. In my early years as a voracious film fan, I graduated from typical adventure fare… Read More

  • Demons

    Lamberto Bava directs this ridiculous 80s giallo splatterfest, from a script co-written with Dario Argento. Two college girls in Berlin accept an invitation to a mysterious film screening, only for… Read More

  • Ivan’s Childhood

    Andrei Tarkovsky’s debut feature is on the one hand a fantastical escape from the horrors of war, but on the other a bleak, nightmarish vision of a young orphan faced… Read More

  • The Game

    David Fincher’s attack on the 1% proves just as poignant, prescient and thrilling today as it was when it was first released, to much disappointment, back in 1997. Michael Douglas… Read More

  • White Zombie

    Bela Lugosi stars as a mysterious slave master in Haiti, whose penetrating gaze seems enough to bring the dead back to life to serve his bidding as shuffling zombies. Many… Read More

  • Bakumatsu Taiyo-den

    Largely unknown outside of its native Japan, this comedy classic set in a Tokyo brothel was just released last month on Blu-ray by Masters of Cinema and is the subject… Read More