Christopher Machell
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Criterion Review: 12 Angry Men
★★★★★ In the 60 years since its release, Sidney Lumet’s masterpiece has lost none of its impact. In this age of unreason, 12 Angry Men remains sorely and urgently contemporary. Filmed originally as a TV movie, Reginald Rose’s screenplay is one of the best ever filmed.Shot in real time à la High Noon, 12 Angry…
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Film Review: Harmonium
★★★★☆ Echoes of The Gift haunt Japanese director Kôji Fukada’s latest feature Harmonium. Ken’ichi Negishi’s long, static shots have more in common with Scandi noir than feel-good melodrama, cluing us into the tragedy that will befall family man Toshio (Kanji Furatachi). Toshio hires his old friend Yasaka (Tadanobu Asano) at his workshop, helping him out…
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Criterion Review: Tampopo
★★★★☆ From the prison-set cookery lesson in Goodfellas to the black cannibalistic comedy of Delicatessen and the gluttony of the gargantuan diner in The Meaning of Life, the theme of food is a rich and well-ploughed field in cinema. But it is surely director Jûzô Itami who offers audiences the definitive on-screen culinary experience in…
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DVD Review: Drunken Master
★★★★☆ Amongst the Rush Hours and the Spies Next Door of his latter-day career, it’s easy to forget that Jackie Chan was once the rightful successor to the screen’s greatest martial artist, Bruce Lee. Eureka’s new release of the 1978 Drunken Master, one of Chan’s earliest and best pictures, is a sure-fire reminder of his…
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DVD Review: O.J.: Made in America
★★★★★ The trial of O.J. Simpson for the brutal murders of Nicole Brown and Ron Goldman – the most televised in history – is one of the defining moments of the 1990s. There have been plenty of O.J. documentaries since, including last year’s worthy TV dramatisation The People v. O.J. Simpson. But none, frankly, have…
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DVD Review: Melody
★★★☆☆ Nostalgia is a powerful agent in cinema, no more so than in Waris Hussein’s 1971 warm depiction of puppy love and school-daze larks, Melody. Forced by his mother to join the Boys’ Brigade to “meet people from different backgrounds,” middle-class Daniel (Mark Lester) strikes a warm-hearted but rough friendship with Ornshaw (Jack Wild –…
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Criterion Review: Solaris
★★★★★ Originally billed as the Soviet 2001: A Space Odyssey, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 masterpiece Solaris is a subtly different beast to Kubrick’s balletic space picture – claustrophobic, meditative and deeply moving. Arguably the first science film to use the cosmos as a metaphor for psychological inner-space, Tarkovsky’s adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s novel was remade in…
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Film Review: Graduation
★★★★★ The Romania of director Cristian Mungiu’s terse, difficult Graduation is one weighed down by endemic corruption, systemic unfairness and economic defeat. Romeo (Adrian Titieni) dreams of a better life for his daughter, Eliza (Maria-Victoria Dragus), who has been awarded a life-changing scholarship to Cambridge University. But after she’s sexually assaulted outside school, the outcome…
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Film Review: Fear Eats the Soul
★★★★★ It’s surely the sheer, unvarnished humanity on display in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s celebrated Ali: Fear Eats the Soul that’s the film’s greatest success. When the eponymous Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan immigrant in his late thirties, meets nervous 60-year-old Emmi (Brigitte Mira) one evening when she steps into a bar to get…
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DVD Review: Pieces
★★★☆☆ The audacious tagline for Pieces‘ grisly poster – “It’s exactly what you think it is” – isn’t kidding: Juan Piquer Simon’s 1982 splatterfest is precisely what one would expect from the director of gross-out creature feature Slugs. The constituent parts of Pieces may be strictly by the numbers, but their sum is nevertheless a…