★★★★☆ The biopic – with its predilection towards didacticism and earnestness – has always been a troublesome form of cinema but, with Van Gogh (1991), Maurice Pialat expertly navigates the minefield of cliché and shakes the shackles of genre expectation to create an intelligent paean to creativity. Often overlooked, Pialat Continue Reading
★★★★☆ Italian master Michelangelo Antonioni was never one to shy away from an elliptical narrative. Depending on your temperament, his cold, alienating projections have been either lauded or denounced, but always cinematically significant. At times, cinematography is his only clear protagonist. Sprawling landscapes with infinite depth of field. Other times, Continue Reading
★★★★★ The years 1964-5 saw the release of Satyajit Ray’s arguable masterpiece The Lonely Wife (Charulata) and the smaller variation on a theme, The Coward (Kapurush), both now reissued in pristine Blu-ray versions by distributor Artificial Eye. Set in the closing years of the nineteenth century, The Lonely Wife tells Continue Reading
★★★☆☆ Based on the popular song of the same name by C. W. McCall (yes, really), Hollywood hell-raiser Sam Peckinpah’s Convoy (1978) gets an unexpected DVD and Blu-ray rerelease this week through StudioCanal, presumably opening up this kitsch cult truck-a-long to a slightly wider – and younger – demographic. Starring Continue Reading