Christopher Machell

★★★★☆ It’s curious that both of this month’s Criterion releases – The Royal Tenenbaums being the other – share so many thematic and narrative similarities. Unsurprising given that Wes Anderson directed the Tenenbaums and produced this effort, both films revolve around dysfunctional, wealthy urban families with troubled patriarchs. But where The Royal Tenenbaums is broadly…

Continue

★★★★★ Matched only by the Coen brothers and Tim Burton for inimitable style, Wes Anderson remains one of the most interesting and idiosyncratic working American directors, and it was the 2001 The Royal Tenenbaums – his third feature – that surely secured his reputation as such. Indeed, with a stellar cast, gorgeous art direction and…

Continue

★★★★★ On first viewing, 2002’s Punch-Drunk Love stands as an outlier against Paul Thomas Anderson’s other more seriously-minded work, starring, as it does, Adam Sandler as the lead in a quirky romantic comedy. But on closer inspection, Anderson’s trademark themes and character tropes are all present and correct: sparse but explosive moments of violence, an…

Continue

★★★★☆ Acclaimed director of 2013’s The Greatful Dead, Eiji Uchida returns with Lowlife Life, an often hilarious, charming and fitfully uncomfortable look into the world of low-budget Japanese filmmaking. Indie director Tetsuo (Kyohiko Shibukawa) is an initially charming Linklater-esque slacker, drowsily pawing at his girlfriend and making silly faces as he smokes cigarettes to the…

Continue

★★★★★ Rarely in cinema has the raw personal and symbolic power of dreaming been so effectively captured as in the Akira Kurosawa’s 1990 feature Dreams. A series of vignettes connected through theme and mood rather than narrative, Kurosawa’s late film beautifully evokes the short and often baffling nature of dreaming, locating his characters in the…

Continue

★★★☆☆ Has there ever been a pop culture phenomenon more endlessly discussed, analysed or obsessed over than Star Wars? Amongst its ever-expanding universe of spin offs, sequels, and relentless fandom, it’s difficult to imagine a new way of looking at the franchise. In his documentary Elstree 1976, British writer-director Jon Spira has achieved just that,…

Continue

★★★★☆ Proving himself once again a master of comic timing and pathos, Takeshi Kitano’s 1996 feature Kids Return represents something of a thematic medley for the director, playing in equal parts as a high school comedy, gangster film and boxing drama. While it is perhaps not as stylistically accomplished as his later Dolls, nor as…

Continue

★★★★☆ Widely regarded as François Truffaut’s greatest masterpiece, Day for Night also signalled the end of the French New Wave and caused a life-long rift between the director and his friend and fellow Nouvelle Vague auteur Jean-Luc Godard. Truffaut was never interested in being the rebel that Godard saw himself as, believing instead that a…

Continue

★★★★★ With Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature only this month, Criterion’s UK release of D.A. Pennebaker’s 1967 Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back could not be timelier. Documenting Dylan’s 1965 tour of England, Don’t Look Back privileges the back-stage conversations, managerial dealings and media interviews over his musical performances. The passive narrator’s…

Continue