Criterion

In The Mood For Love

Probably Wong Kar Wai’s best film and certainly his most visually accomplished, this is a delicate, ornate study of social mores, forbidden love and loyalty in the face of infidelity.… Read More
Blast of Silence

An intriguing little oddity from the Criterion Collection that rarely seems to get talked about much. Shot low budget on the streets of New York at Christmas, it’s the story… 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
Taste of Cherry

Pretty much epitomises what Abbas Kiarostami does so well – taking the mundane and making it profound. Homayoun Ershadi stars as a seemingly ordinary man driving around the hillsides on… 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
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
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
Rosemary’s Baby

Returning to familiar ground first covered in his earlier film, Repulsion, Polish director Roman Polanski chose to direct this adaptation of Ira Levin’s bestselling novel for his Hollywood debut. Mia… Read More
Sansho the Bailiff

I really struggled with this film. I am familiar with Mizoguchi Kenji’s work, and have enjoyed the films of his I have seen, but nothing could prepare me for the… Read More
Badlands

The first Terrence Malick film I ever saw, when Alex Cox showcased it way back in the early 1990s on BBC2’s Moviedrome series, this remians the director’s most linear, narratively… Read More
The Man Who Knew Too Much

I had seen Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 American remake before, starring James Stewart and Doris Day, but this was my first time seeing his original British production. Leslie Banks and Edna… Read More
On The Waterfront

A true masterpiece of American Cinema, accompanied by one of the greatest screen performances of all time, Marlon Brando would never be better than he is here, as boxer turned… Read More
Quadrophenia

My March entry in Twitch’s Full Disclosure feature is Franc Roddam’s big screen adaptation of The Who’s classic album. Phil Daniels plays a pill-popping young Mod, who tires of his… Read More
REVIEW: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp

Until now the only time I had seen this film was at university, where our Film Studies lecturer insisted that we included it during the opening semester programme of the… Read More
Identification of a Woman

While I wouldn’t class myself as much of a fan of Michelangelo Antonioni, I have enjoyed all of his films that I have seen. However, until today that consists solely… Read More
Yi Yi

One of the founding members of the New Taiwanese Cinema movement that sprung up on the island in the early 1980s, Edward Yang was responsible for some of the best… Read More
Goke, Body Snatcher From Hell

The second title from Criterion’s Eclipse series When Horror Came to Shochiku is a step up from the first film in the four-disc set, but not by much. A plane… Read More