Susan Patterson watches Victor Erice’s Spanish classic
“Can it be that an unfinished film is one of the best in Spanish cinema history? Yes it can… 95 minutes of emotions so intense that you’re left breathless. I cry every time I watch it.” Pedro Almodóvar
Estrella (Icíar Bollaín), is close to her doctor father, Agustin (Omero Antonutti) but mystified by his past, and how it has made him the slightly distant man he has become.
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
Sarah Slade looks at a beautiful retread of an old theme.
There isn’t much that is new about Departure. An English family rattle around their French holiday home, replete with colour-washed walls, Le Creuset everything and a lovely collection of china. An enigmatic stranger appears and there is a sexual awakening. Everybody goes home, wiser, sadder and ready to face the future. It’s a theme that has been explored in many ways, by many film makers over many years. You could even say that middle-class angst in Aude is quite a safe topic for first-time director Andrew Steggall, but that would detract from what is a rather beautiful, sensitively acted film. Continue reading Departure
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
Back again, this month sees a slightly different “Instant Reaction” format, in that MrMoth has only heard these songs once and has only had the length of the song to write the review. Because sometimes you need a challenge, ok?
Does the lack of women behind the lens reflect on what we see on the screen? The Tramp considers where women are in film.
At some point in our lives most of us have sought out role models or characters that we aspire to be. It isn’t the case that women only relate to female characters and men only relate to male characters. It is about people relating to the most interesting and relevant characters to them. But what if every character or story that you relate to, every role model, is male?
“Media images exert a powerful influence in creating and perpetuating our unconscious biases” – Geena Davis Continue reading Positive Role Models: Where are the Women in Film?
Here at Mostly Film we were very excited to hear that La La Land, the new Emma Stone-Ryan Gosling movie directed by Damian Chazelle which opens the Venice Film Festival this week, is being sold as a “reinvention of the musical”. In celebration, Fiona Pleasance introduces a look at some of our favourites of the genre.
“But when is it the MEN’s Edinburgh International Festival?”
Lissy Lovett asks the important questions.
If you had the chance to walk the paths of fantasyland, would you? Maybe, but maybe not in the 1980s. Let MrMoth guide you past the dangers untold and hardships unnumbered.
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