October Film: At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (1964)
At Midnight I’ll Take Your Soul (‘À Meia Noite Levarei Sua Alma’) 84 minutes | 9 November 1964 | Brazil ‘Early Brazilian horror film directed by and starring José Mojica Marins, who...
Rams (2015)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Ageing, unmarried, and unkempt, brothers Gummi (Sigurður Sigurjónsson) and Kiddi (Theodór Júlíusson) work side by side as sheep farmers in a cold and desolate valley in Iceland's northeast. Each the master of their own flock, they have not spoken for forty years owing to a dispute over their father's inheritance: considering Gummi the more conscientious worker, their father left him the whole of the land...
February Film: Under the Red Robe Analysis
A dowdy swashbuckler even at the time of its release in 1937, Under the Red Robe remains a curiosity today as the final film by Victor Sjöström, the father of Swedish cinema....
February Film: Under the Red Robe (1937)
Under the Red Robe 81 minutes | 8 November 1937 | United Kingdom/United States ‘The massacre of Saint Bartholemew in 1572 had swilled the gutters of Paris with Huguenot blood. 50 years...
Virgin Mountain (2015)
★★★ (3 out of 4 stars) - Fúsi (Gunnar Jónsson) is forty-three years old and a virgin, still living at home with his mother. He spends his days working as a baggage handler at Keflavik airport, his evenings wargaming with his friend Mörður (Sigurjón Kjartansson), as together they painstakingly recreate the Battle of El Alamein, and each Friday he orders Pad Thai and eats cloistered in the same corner of the same restaurant...
The Assassin (2015)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - In 9th century China, the weakened Tang Dynasty struggles to retain control over its militarised province of Weibo. Nie Yinniang (Shu Qi) has been trained by the nun Jiaxin (Fang-Yi Sheu) to assassinate corrupt government officials, but though she possesses all of the art, she cannot bring herself to kill a man as he sits cradling his sleeping son. So Jiaxin, who has raised Yinniang from the age of ten, sets her charge a more personal task...
December Film: Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka Analysis
After the embarrassing failure of the adolescent poem Hanz Kuchelgarten, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka was the first collection of short stories published by Nikolai Gogol, in two volumes between 1831 and...
December Film: Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1961)
Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka («Вечера на хуторе близ Диканьки») 66 minutes | 8 December 1961 | Soviet Union Based on the story ‘Christmas Eve’ by Nikolai Gogol, this eccentric and fantastical fairy tale takes place...
November Film: The Little Match Girl (1928) Analysis
The Little Match Girl (‘La Petite Marchande d’allumettes‘), based on the short story of the same name by Hans Christian Andersen, was the eighth of nine silent films directed by Jean Renoir. Released in June...