The Hands of Orlac was a bit of a disappointment, to be honest. Directed in 1924 by Robert Wiene, who most famously directed The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and reunites him with actor Conrad Viedt. It’s based on a novel by Maurice Renard, but it’s not half as good as Caligari. Wiene tones down the … Continue reading The Hands of Orlac – Blu-Ray Review →

We Children from Bahnhof Zoo is perhaps the strangest reimagining I've ever seen. It's "based on" the life of Christiane Vera Felscherinow, better known as Christiane F., who conducted a series of interviews with two journalists who were ghostwriters of the memoir Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo. It was adapted into a fantastic 1981 film Christiane F. – Wir Kinder vom Bahnhof Zoo by director Uli Edel, which was made soon enough after the events that … Continue reading We Children from Bahnhof Zoo – DVD Review →

Merrily We Go to Hell is the second feature from pioneering director Dorothy Arzner to come out from Criterion in the past year. Arzner was the only woman who directed films during the heyday of classic Hollywood, with Ida Lupino finally directing a film in 1949. She started out in the silent era, which actually … Continue reading Merrily We Go To Hell – Blu-Ray Review →

Flowers of Shanghai is an almost perfect cinematic experience, a film of such incredible calm yet it rages like a storm within your heart. It is a film with no beginning or end, just a loose collection of scenes that invoke and create an entire world. It is a film of long takes, with a … Continue reading Flowers of Shanghai – Blu-Ray Review →

Paul Verhoeven was flying high in Hollywood after the back-to-back success of Robocop and Total Recall, and Joe Eszterhas was getting ridiculous sums of money for his screenplays. Eszterhas sold his script for Basic Instinct for over 3 million dollars, which was unheard of for a spec script—but this was the late '80s/early '90s, where the notion of … Continue reading Basic Instinct – Blu-Ray Review →