From parody to sincere tribute, the myth of King Arthur is as closely woven into the fabric of cinematic storytelling as it is the folkloric collective memory of the British Isles. With another take – Guy Ritchie’s would-be franchise spawner Legend of the Sword – arriving on disc this week we take a look at Arthur on film.
Twin Peaks has returned, but does it meet expectations? theTramp investigates
When Twin Peaks first aired, back in 1990, its impact was monumental. I’m not talking about the impact that it had on television; the realisation that narrative structures could move about a bit, that magic realism could step off the page, that strong characters could lend themselves to unpredictable narrative formats and still be watchable. No I am talking about the impact that it had on me personally.
The newest Criterion Collection Blu-Ray, Sidney Lumet’s 12 Angry Men, hits the shelves in the UK on 15th May. Fiona Pleasance joins the jury.
The premise of 12 Angry Men could hardly be simpler. Almost all of the film takes place in a single room in a New York City courthouse in the mid-1950s, where the members of a jury deliberate on the trial of a young man accused of murdering his father.
On 7 November New Wave Films are releasing Cemetery of Splendour, directed by Apichatpong Weeresethakul, who won the Palme d’Or with his earlier film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Continue reading Cemetery of Splendour
Matthew Carter squares up to ailurophobia
When RKO Radio Pictures were feeling the pinch from the excesses of Citizen Kane, a directive for a meat and potatoes B-movie landed on Val Lewton’s lap. Jacques Tourneur stepped up as director and DeWitt Bodeen produced the screenplay. Using sets from Orson Welles’s The Magnificent Ambersons, Tourneur and Lewton created an entirely new genre: noir-horror-sex-thriller. Continue reading Here, Puss Puss Puss…
D A Pennebaker’s classic access-all-areas take on Bob Dylan’s 1965 tour of England is restored and repackaged in this Criterion release. John Wilby looks back at Dont Look Back
Gareth Negus watches the TV series of Wolf Creek.
Spank The Monkey looks at Criterion’s new release of a neglected landmark in Japanese cinema.
Musashi Miyamoto is the Samurai. No, scratch that: Musashi Miyamoto is the Samurai. For generations of Japanese, this 17th century wandering swordsman has been the ideal representation of the country’s warrior class. A painter, an author, and a swordsman who won over sixty duels: if he didn’t already exist, someone would have had to invent him. And even though he did exist, people have been inventing him anyway: for centuries Japanese culture has repeatedly taken the bare bones of his story and manufactured new myths out of it. Continue reading The Samurai Trilogy
Britain’s finest ever zombie biker movie has come back from the dead, courtesy of the BFI and Scalarama. Spank The Monkey takes a ride with the Death Wheelers.
If you had to identify the best-loved post on MostlyFilm – and I mean properly loved, rather than merely popular because it comes high on a Google search for ‘young boy handjob’ – then I suspect that Ricky Young’s four-part series If My Calculations Are Correct would be a prime candidate. It acknowledges that we don’t watch films in a vacuum: the circumstances of their viewing are as important as the films themselves. IMCAC isn’t just about a collection of science fiction classics – it’s about young Ricky encountering them every Tuesday teatime on BBC2, and having his mind opened to a whole genre of cinema. Continue reading Psychomania
Ricky Young looks at a wonderful slice of not-very-much, driven entirely by the charisma of its two leads.
MostlyFilm 