BFI
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa described his 1961 hit Yojimbo as a tale of “rivalry on both sides, and both sides are equally bad… we are weakly caught in the middle, and it is impossible to choose between the evils”. Toshiro Mifune’s nameless rōnin pitches up a run-down village purely by chance, tossing a stick in the air at a fork in the road to choose which direction to take.Though taking place in mid-19th century Japan, the sets reflect Kurosawa’s love of classic westerns, the scruffy buildings facing onto a dusty main street. The presence of a dog carrying a severed hand is a bad omen, a dispute over Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa’s mastery of different genres is a given and one of High and Low’s strengths is a seamless blending of various styles within a single film. Though highly rated by Japanese critics, this 1963 adaptation of an Ed McBain 87th Precinct crime novel has been long overlooked, High and Low taking in corporate politics, familial tensions and a thrilling race to catch an enigmatic villain.Kurosawa regular Toshiro Mifune plays Kingo Gondo, a senior executive at National Shoes. He's at odds with other board members seeking to cut costs by producing cheap, short-lived footwear (“shoes must Read more ...
Helen Hawkins
The opening scene of the Old Vic’s Oedipus is dominated by a giant backdrop of a skull-like face, eyes shut and rock-like. It belongs to the actor playing Oedipus, presumably, Rami Malek. This is as near to a close-up of the title character as we get.Co-directing, Matthew Warchus and choreographer Hofesh Shechter have created a claustrophobic Thebes, dazzled by the sun and water-less. Its only features are a microphone stand and a lit dais, both of which rise from the floor as needed. To begin with, the backdrop lighting turns a flaming tangerine, fading to a pallid lilac by the end. For long Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Kurosawa’s 1949 thriller probes post-war morality in a Tokyo whose ruins and US occupation mostly remain just out of shot, in a heatwave causing mistakes and madness. The theft of callow detective Murakami (Toshiro Mifune)’s police pistol on a crowded trolleybus and his guilty hunt for what becomes a murder weapon provide the narrative, and sharp-featured young Mifune’s coiled performance, alternating mimed grace with feline fierceness, is the arrow carrying it to its bruising conclusion.Kurosawa and Mifune are still defined in the West by Rashomon and Seven Samurai, breakthrough Fifties Read more ...
graham.rickson
Someone told me recently that Netflix subscribers can view just 22 films made before 1980. I've no idea if this is true (please correct me if not), but it’s certainly a reason to continue watching and collecting films on physical discs. Plus, there’s the bonus features, booklet notes, commentaries and deleted scenes, all things which you won’t find on streaming services. Here’s my pick of the year’s Blu-ray releases, in no particular order:Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Pharaoh (Second Run) is an eye-popping Egyptian epic from 1966. Filmed mostly in the deserts of Uzbekistan with scores of Soviet Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The Oblong Box is a phantom 1969 follow-up to Michael Reeves’ Witchfinder General, sharing star Vincent Price and much cast and crew, after the brilliant young British director’s OD forced his dismissal days before shooting. It also began replacement Gordon Hessler and co-writer Christopher Wicking’s own Price-starring horror sequence, notably the bizarre, Mod anti-fascist Scream and Scream Again (1970), placing this obscure film at a packed cult crossroads.Witchfinder General’s savage account of Matthew Hopkins’ 17th century East Anglian rampage had been dragooned into AIP’s Poe-Price cycle Read more ...
Nick Hasted
This other major work by the writer of the English folk horror landmark The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971), Robert Wynne-Simmons, is more restrained than that unsettlingly erotic, dreadful conjuring of rustic demons and collective evil. He argues on his sole directorial feature’s Blu-ray debut that it isn’t folk horror at all, simply an Irish folk tale in pre-Famine days “when magic had a value”.The Outcasts (1982) is earthed in the boggy mud and lush green of West Ireland, where innocent Maura (Mary Ryan) is bullied by her siblings in a stone home seemingly pulled from the ground. Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The missing element is magic, the swooning sense of the romantic, spiritual and supernal which Michael Powell’s partnership with Emeric Pressburger found in the British and especially English soul, sharpened by Hungarian Pressburger’s fascinated love for his exile’s home.These five minor, pre-Archers films don’t fairly define Powell’s role – his elemental, important The Edge of the World (1937) also predates British cinema’s equivalent of Lennon meeting McCartney. Mostly made as subsidised, cheap native “quota quickies”, they show an apprentice director’s vigorous cinematic fluency and Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Sir Ernest Shackleton's Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, which set out in 1914 only to be marooned until August 1916, was a failure but a “glorious failure”, in the words of one crew member, the meteorologist Leonard Hussey. It is also perhaps the greatest survival story ever told.In a legendary feat of perseverance, Shackleton kept a crew of 30 men alive for almost two years in brutal conditions – and on a diet of penguins, seals, and their own sledge dogs – after his ship, Endurance, became trapped in pack ice and sank in the Weddell Sea.“I have marvelled often at the thin line that Read more ...
Hugh Barnes
Unlike the controversial Netflix show Baby Reindeer, which challenges many of the same attitudes towards sexual harassment, self-delusion, and stalking’s gender bias, Alice Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star does not bill itself as a true story.Quite the opposite, in fact. Timestalker is totally – and delightfully – bonkers right from its first scene, set in 1688 against a backdrop of the Scottish Covenanter uprising, where Agnes, a dowdy spinster (played by Lowe herself and introduced, literally, at a spinning wheel) falls headlong in love at a public execution, again quite Read more ...
Justine Elias
Before Alice Lowe wrote her first short film scripts, she was, despite success in television and theater, “terrified” of making a full-length feature. “I thought it was some untouchable Holy Grail. That you have to be somehow inducted before you’re allowed to breathe the word ‘film'." She's not terrified these days. Timestalker, Lowe’s second feature as director, writer, and star, is a fully realised passion project in every sense.In the history-hopping romantic comedy-thriller, Lowe portrays an obsessed heroine in pursuit of her dream lover – whether he cares or not. From the Stone Age and Read more ...
graham.rickson
Akira Kurosawa’s Ikiru (To Live) begins with an X-ray photo of the central character’s cancer-ridden stomach, a man described by the narrator (an uncredited Kurosawa) as someone “drifting through life… we can’t say that he is really alive at all…”.It’s an audacious opening, and what promises to be a small-scale personal drama soon expands and takes on epic dimensions. Kurosawa stalwart Takashi Shimura is perfectly cast as Kanji Watanabe, a low-ranking civil servant in a Tokyo town hall who’s spent 30 years "drifting through life" surrounded by colleagues who specialise in passing the buck. In Read more ...