Before making the masterful Coach to Vienna and The Ear, director Karel Kachyna collaborated with his regular screenwriter Jan Procházka on Long Live the Republic!, an extraordinary and ambitious melding of reality, memory and fantasy set in late WWII Czechoslovakia. A mesmerised Slarek discovered an unexpected personal connection with its young protagonist on Second Run’s recently released Blu-ray.
The July releases from Radiance have been revealed as Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma and other works, Terayama Shuji’s The Boxer, Romolo Guerrieri’s The Double, Wojciech Has’s The Hourglass Sanatorium, Robert Bierman’s Vampire’s Kiss, and Two Boxes: Televised Terror in Franco’s Spain.
recent reviews, articles and blogs
Raoul Peck’s riveting, urgent and impossibly ambitious documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 scrutinises the authoritarian practices and tendencies of our times, with George Orwell as his guide. Jerry Whyte scans Peck’s busy collage of the dangers we face and probes the gaps in his account of Orwell’s life and work.
The sixth Children’s Film Foundation Bumper Box, a three-disc DVD release from the BFI, includes nine films from 1954 to 1980. Review by Gary Couzens.
At last, a mainstream movie with no antecedents (OK, OK, it was adapted from a novel by Andy Weir, author of The Martian) or affiliation with any known and probably exhausted intellectual properties, an original film to enjoy on its own merits. With only one tiny caveat, Camus is greatly entertained by Project Hail Mary…
A struggling artist buys a talisman that transforms his fortune without realising the true nature of the deal he has struck in the fascinating horror-tinged Faustian drama from 1943, The Devil’s Hand [La Main du diable]. Slarek keeps an appointment with a bureaucratic Old Nick with Eureka’s typically fine new Blu-ray.
Erotic gameplaying with Peter McEnery, Diane Cilento and Glenda Jackson in Negatives, the debut feature of Peter Medak, made in 1968. The BFI have released it on Blu-ray as Flipside number 53. Review by Gary Couzens.
A mild-mannered bookkeeper steals a valuable gem and is pursued across Europe by professional investigator Milo March in The Man Inside, director John Gilling’s adaptation of the novel of the same name by M.E. Chaber. Slarek finds himself in two minds about the film but has no such qualms about Indicator’s typically strong Blu-ray.