Category: Film

Film, Reviews

Physical Media Recommendations | THE BORDERLANDS (2013) & THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1929)

A J. Black

As many of you reading will know, I’m a big physical media movie collector these days. And despite cries that streaming will see the end of the disc-based movie space, it feels a resurgence is building and at the vanguard are boutique blu-ray labels producing staggeringly good content for under-appreciated, long lost or even some of the most popular pictures out there.

I’m going to recommend two recent releases today from several labels which are enormously worth your time, and which the labels were kind enough to send over my way.

Continue reading “Physical Media Recommendations | THE BORDERLANDS (2013) & THE CAT AND THE CANARY (1929)” →
Film, Reviews

GREEN ROOM (2015) & POSSESSOR (2020) | Blu-Ray Review

A J. Black

Second Sight continue bringing home some tremendous releases on Blu-Ray and 4k, and recently have unleashed on the same day two modern titans of cinematic darkness.

Green Room, from director Jeremy Saulnier and released in 2015, is a survivalist thriller at heart – a horror movie which accentuates the fear and threat of violence above the blood and gore, though Saulnier delivers more than enough of that in some of the most vicious, nasty explosions of brutality committed to film in a while, some of which almost come out of nowhere. With a superb ensemble cast led by Patrick Stewart playing to a tense, sparse and taut script, this is a cold, tough, yet involving and oddly darkly comedic piece of pulp survivalism.

Possessor, meanwhile, released in 2020 from director Brandon Cronenberg, is a really simple take on possession and indeed assassination, brewed up into an examination of folie a deux through the prism of intense, dramatic and weird horror. Andrea Riseborough & Christopher Abbott are mesmerising in the central key performances, carrying Cronenberg’s disturbing, trippy and downright nightmarish script fuelled by all kinds of dark, memorable imagery. It’s really imaginative. Really bleak. Really good.

Continue reading “GREEN ROOM (2015) & POSSESSOR (2020) | Blu-Ray Review” →
Film, Reviews

HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM / DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS | Blu-Ray Review

A J. Black

Fair play to StudioCanal for digging out fairly arcane British cinematic treasures and giving them the once over, as demonstrated with Horrors of the Black Museum and Devil Girl from Mars, which they were kind enough to send me a copy of.

They don’t come as a pair, rather separate releases, but I’m badging them together as they’re arriving on the same day from the same distributor. Both are B-pictures you might not have previously heard of, dating back to the 1950, but both as demonstrated by their special features have a place within the post-war cinematic fabric of Britain and growing trends of the age.

Continue reading “HORRORS OF THE BLACK MUSEUM / DEVIL GIRL FROM MARS | Blu-Ray Review” →
Books, Film, Football, TV

Coming in 2024: Film, TV & Books and Football (yes, Football!) to get excited about

A J. Black

Welcome to 2024 everyone!

I keep thinking that we should be in the space age whenever another year of the 2020s ticks over, when in reality we’re sliding closer to pre-world war tension decades with an added dose of climate hell thrown in. Cheery stuff, eh? Well, much as I love some political discourse, you’re not here for that, so let’s talk more frivolous matters.

The world might be going to hell in a handcart again this year generally but there is plenty of that lovely escapism to look forward to, and I thought I’d give a little breakdown about some of the bits and pieces in film and TV I’m looking forward to, plus a few additional things in the cultural space, as a primer for what 2024 might bring.

Strap yourselves in and let’s do this year, shall we?

Continue reading “Coming in 2024: Film, TV & Books and Football (yes, Football!) to get excited about” →
Film

2023 in MOVIES: My Top 10

A J. Black

Hello hello!

Two years ago, I did a bit of a round up of my favourite films and TV shows for 2021. Last year, it didn’t happen but this year I’m back for a few roundups about movies, TV, and books and podcasts that I’ve engaged with over the course of 2023 – all being the main forms of entertainment I spend my time with.

Let’s start with movie films. Please bear in mind that this serves as a personal ranking, not one of critical quality. I haven’t by any means seen everything that might qualify for a critical top 10 this year.

That said, here we go…

Continue reading “2023 in MOVIES: My Top 10” →
Essays, Film

LOVE ACTUALLY: A Fairytale in Downing St | Film Feature

A J. Black

It would be fair to say that Richard Curtis’ crowd pleaser Love Actually is not hard hitting political discourse, but one of its central plot threads does warrant closer examination.

Curtis’ film is a loose-knit, Altman-esque character piece under the central umbrella of ‘love’, mostly involving Curtis’ traditional retinue of cloyingly middle class Londoners living in a fantasy version of Britain’s capital where everyone has money, time to navel-gaze, and doesn’t worry about laws such as breaching airport security gates and things like that. It is, simply, a load of sickeningly twee nonsense inflated, bizarrely, into some kind of totemic Christmas film that only humbugs suggest might not just be rubbish, but also contain numerous creepy plots and almost sociopathic characters.

You only have to look at Andrew Lincoln wooing Keira Knightley with cue cards on the doorstep of the house she shares not only with her boyfriend, but his best friend.

Leaving that aside, there is one plot line in Love Actually that bears looking at, given outside of Emma Thompson’s genuinely moving performance as the wife of a cheater, it probably stands as the only thread in the film that is easy to stomach: the romance between Hugh Grant’s incumbent British Prime Minister and Martine McCutcheon’s cockney Downing Street tea girl. There is a charm about their characters that belies the rest of the film, even if it bears almost zero reality with anything else in British politics, bar the thinnest of tangential nods and winks to both the Blairite and Bush eras – fitting as the film was made and is set during their tenures, and at the point tensions were fraying.

Love Actually might here be political fantasy, but it has one foot in post-9/11 reality.

Continue reading “LOVE ACTUALLY: A Fairytale in Downing St | Film Feature” →
Film, Reviews

MEAN STREETS (1973) | Blu-Ray Review

A J. Black

It’s been a heck of a year for Martin Scorsese, what with the build up and critically feted release of Killers of the Flower Moon, not to mention his ongoing cultural battle with the legions of popcorn fodder fandom. He’s also been doing a lot of TikTok-ing, because of course he has.

Many a cinema fan will have used the opportunity of a new Scorsese picture, which doesn’t roll off the production line every year, as an excuse to revisit his vibrant and eclectic filmography. What’s your Scorsese poison? I’m partial to a bit of Goodfellas, a bit of Raging Bull, and actually more of his darkly comic output such as After Hours and The King of Comedy. They’re very much my jam.

One of his earliest being re-released as 2024 begins is Mean Streets, which first arrived in 1973 before Scorsese made his name significantly with Taxi Driver a couple of years later. One of the ‘new wave’ of American auteurs emerging from the ashes of the studio system in the 1960s, Scorsese earned his spurs with deliberately New York-centric explorations of his own sense of Catholic guilt, upbringing and meaning, that conflict with modern times.

Continue reading “MEAN STREETS (1973) | Blu-Ray Review” →
Film, Reviews

WORLD NOIR Vol. 1 | Blu-Ray Review

A J. Black

An old friend of mine, enjoying my surname, would often refer to me as ‘Monsieur Noir‘, perhaps unaware that noir is best associated with a cinematic style that transcends nations. Noir is, and always has been, global.

Radiance, a fairly new boutique brand on the block, set out to make that point with their World Noir Vol. 1 set, a copy of which they were kind enough to furnish me with. Though by no means an expert in noir, with plenty of education in British and American terms yet to come, it has always interested me as a sub-genre. The chance to catch several fairly obscure international examples of the form was too good to pass up.

This set contains three pictures – Japan’s Ore wa matteru ze aka I Am Waiting from 1957, France’s Un temoin dans la ville aka Witness in the City, from 1959, and Italy’s Un maledetto imbroglio aka The Facts of Murder, also from 1959 – the only film of the set I was not sent, so I’ll just list features it contains in that case and talk a little more about the preceding two films.

Continue reading “WORLD NOIR Vol. 1 | Blu-Ray Review” →
Essays, Film, The Exorcist

The Quiet Horror of THE EXORCIST | Film Feature

A J. Black

In advance of The Exorcist: Believer this week, the ‘legacyquel’ from David Gordon Green, I decided over the weekend to throw on William Friedkin’s The Exorcist for the first time in some years. This time, I got something new from it.

My history with The Exorcist isn’t necessarily legion (no pun intended, for all you William Peter Blatty fans). It wasn’t a film I grew up with, not to the degree of The Shining from Stanley Kubrick. I might first have become aware of it thanks to The Blair Witch Project in 1999, and how the Cannes reaction to that seminal found footage horror mirrored the legendary reports from showings of The Exorcist in 1973 where people threw up, fainted or stormed out in terror. Many comparisons, fairly or not, were drawn at the time.

It took me many more years to watch The Exorcist, for some reason, despite always being a sizeable fan of horror. Perhaps it was accessibility, or just simply the fact during the 2000s I engaged much less with cinema on a general basis. I had also little relationship with Friedkin or 1970s cinema at this point, both of which I have since worked to remedy. I’ve flirted with podcasting about 70s movies. I have a hankering to write about them more. But I wasn’t there. I wasn’t born until the 80s and I sometimes think that matters, in terms of perspective, not just nostalgia.

Continue reading “The Quiet Horror of THE EXORCIST | Film Feature” →
Essays, Film

Streaming is broken. And Culture is suffering | Film/TV Feature

A J. Black

Of all the recent announcements online about studios cancelling TV series or movie projects for economic reasons, the news of what Paramount+ are now up to has caused the greatest ire.

Here’s the announcement but in a nutshell, as part of yet another tax write off, Paramount have decided not just to cancel a bunch of shows but also remove them, with immediate effect, from their streaming service. The most high profile victims are Star Trek: Prodigy, the animated spin-off in the long-running franchise, and Grease prequel series, Rise of the Pink Ladies, which came out a matter of months ago and is now being wiped clean.

Wiped is perhaps the right adjective here as it recalls the practice, certainly in the U.K., where in the early days of television, productions were frequently wiped from tape and permanently lost. Doctor Who widely has many early 1960s episodes missing as a result of this, with some people dedicating decades to unearthing them.

Continue reading “Streaming is broken. And Culture is suffering | Film/TV Feature” →