John Frankenheimer is one of my favourite directors, mainly due to his trilogy of films about paranoia in the '60s: The Manchurian Candidate, Seven Days in May and, perhaps the best of them all, Seconds. Frankenheimer did some fine work in the '70s, most notably the four-hour-long The Iceman Cometh, but like many men of his generation he had problems with [...]
Panic in the Streets is an early Elia Kazan film–the film he made right before A Streetcar Named Desire, which completely changed his career's trajectory. It's a slightly odd film for Kazan because it utilised expressionist photography and was pretty much a straightforward film noir. It’s usually not held up as one of his best films, but it’s [...]
The Transfiguration is a remarkable little vampire film that had somehow escaped my radar until I was emailed by the PR representative, asking if would I like to cover this Blu-ray release. It played Cannes under Un Certain Regard after the film's director, Michael O'Shea, sent it in simply on the whim—and then was shocked and [...]
Charlie Wilson's War was Mike Nichols’s final film as a director, completed before he passed away in 2014 from a heart attack. His reputation was made entirely on his first four features—Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Catch-22 and Carnal Knowledge—all of which came out in the ‘60s and early ‘70s. However, his real love was the theatre, so [...]
This isn’t the Philip K. Dick series Electric Dreams that’s expected later this year. Instead, it’s the 80s cheesefest. Electric Dreams was the first film directed by Steve Barron, who was incredibly influential as a maker of music videos (A-Ha’s ‘Take on Me,’ Michael Jackson’s ‘Billie Jean,’ etc.) and films in the 80s. His style [...]
