Christopher Machell
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Wake Up and Kill’
★★★★☆ Following hot on the heels of the Blu-ray release of Requiescant (1967) comes director Carlo Lizzani’s Wake Up and Kill (1966), based on the true story of infamous jewel thief Luciano Lutring. Dripping in late-1960s Italian cool, Wake Up and Kill prefigures the grimy American crime cinema of the 1970s, feeling like a grubbier,…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Blood Rage’
★★★☆☆ John Grissmer’s teen slasher Blood Rage (1987), newly released on Blu-ray, is at once utterly dreadful and irresistibly brilliant. Arrow Video has gone all out with this release, offering three distinct versions – the theatrical release, renamed as Nightmare at Shadow Woods, the harder home video release and a new composite cut of the…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Requiescant’
★★★★☆ The Spaghetti Western, as exemplified by The Good, The Bad, and Ugly (1966), Once Upon a Time in The West (1968), and Django (1966), is defined by its heightened visual style, its brutality, and its amorality. Carlo Lizzani’s Requiescant (1967), nicely presented here in a vibrant and crisp Blu-ray transfer, has the first two…
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Special Feature: ‘Filmish: A Graphic History of Film’
Lovers of cinema are in for a treat this month, with the launch of Edward Ross’ Filmish: A Graphic History of Film, a cinematic history told through the comic book medium. Filmish offers a fairly familiar and broad narrative of European and Hollywood cinema, though its deep love for film shines through. Moreover, the graphic…
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DVD Review: ‘Slow West’
★★★★☆ There are two types of western: those that build up the myth of the Old West – Rio Bravo (1959), The Searchers (1956), Shane (1953) – and those that break it – The Good, The Bad and The Ugly (1966), Unforgiven (1992) and High Plains Drifter (1973). With John Maclean’s astonishing debut feature, the…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Poe’s Black Cats’
★★★★☆ Edgar Allan Poe’s famous short story The Black Cat has been adapted in almost every era of cinema, from Universal’s two classic offerings ‘suggested’ by Poe’s tale to Roger Corman’s Tales of Terror (1962) and Dario Argento’s 1990 version, starring Harvey Keitel. What links these films is not so much their source material but…
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Film Review: ‘The Nightmare’
★★☆☆☆ Sleep paralysis – a condition whereby sufferers wake in the night to find themselves helplessly paralysed, overwhelmed with an impression of a nearby malign force – is both a terrifying experience for its victims, and a recurring concept in art, literature and culture. It’s a shame then that Rodney Ascher’s The Nightmare (2015) squanders…
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Blu-ray Review: ‘Otto Preminger Noir Collection’
★★★★★ Alongside Billy Wilder, Howard Hawks, and John Huston, Otto Preminger was one of the most influential film noir directors in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. This new collection by the BFI gives us three of his finest works, namely Fallen Angel (1945), Whirlpool (1949) and Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950). The collection itself…
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DVD Review: ‘Big Game’
★★★☆☆ “This is not a good idea.” Uttered around the halfway mark by Samuel L. Jackson’s nonplussed President William Moore, this neatly summarises the thesis of Jalmari Helander’s Big Game (2014), an imperfect but enjoyable mixture of McTiernan-esque violence, Bruckheimer-esque silliness and 1980s-vintage Spielberg kids’ adventure. Indeed, Big Game’s veering tone often threatens to derail…