Well-regarded but under-seen on initial release a decade ago, The Borderlands has become something of a beloved cult favourite, one that along with Ben Wheatley’s early work was key with reviving folk at the centre of horror culture. On its tenth anniversary, this Second Sight re-release gives an opportunity to re-examine the film, and to find it even stronger than the first time round, standing head and shoulders above many of the films that have followed in its footsteps, whilst remaining kind of inimitable, a totally singular concoction.
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A re-release of Abel Ferrara’s Fear City finds the cult classic as interesting in its flaws as ever. It’s the mid-'80s, New York is pre-clean up, still a landscape of neon, sex and hovering violence. Former Boxer Matt Rossi (Tom Berenger) and his business partner Nicky (Jack Scalia) run a management company for Manhattan’s best strip club dancers.
Nuri Bilge Ceylan maintains an eye for the sublime in hopelessness and vice versa in his latest epic.
I know it’s the oldest trick in the book for distributors to sell their films in as straightforward a way as possible, but Jesus Christ, trying to sell La Chimera as a taut heist film is doing no one any favours. Its only resemblance to The Italian Job is that there’s Italians, and well bugger me they’ve got a job to do. What there is instead, in typical Rohrwacher fashion, a film that defies categorisation, that hovers at the space where divinity meets the reality of a world where greed curdles all corners of life.
It does well to initially evoke its era. The film’s primary tones are garish neon and sweat on skin, like a grimy San Junipero, and the set design and cinematography do well to create sense of a place where macho sleaze permeates every nook and cranny of the town. The problem is the characters that inhabit it feel too archetypal, too lacking in the eccentricities and unpredictabilities that would make them believable.
Following up a breakout film is obviously a difficult position, a constant questioning of whether to continue doing what made you a success in the first place, or to experiment, to use the newfound resources that success affords to embrace grander visions. It’s a position that director Junta Yamaguchi and screenwriter Makoto Ueda find themselves in, and one in which they succeed and fail in equal measure.
This re-release of cult classic Alligator finds it in as joyous as ever; a fun, knowing creature feature wrapped in a lovingly extensive package of remasters and extras from the ever-reliable 101 Films.
The film takes this classic western trope, establishing a small band of characters and setting them off on an expedition, but foregrounds the violence and cruelty at the heart of their quest, with every encounter they stumble upon drawing more and more out of them, and further brutality into the story.
There is something strangely admirable about how big Mad Cats swings, its commitment to its own childish rambunctiousness; but ultimately it can’t string itself together beyond a funny idea and some well-done set pieces. There’s certainly an interesting film-maker in there, and there is evidence of it here; but equally there is one that is still finding their feet, still to nail the difficult execution of a particular brand of absurdity.
Against the backdrop of a 2023 which brought a BFI retrospective, and what looks to be his late career masterpiece, EO, comes this release from Second Run of three of Polish auteur Jerzy Skolimowski’s key early works. They show a truly forward thinking director, whose work from this era remains relatively under-seen compared to his contemporaries, despite it containing some true classics of the European New Wave.
Appearing as a tribute to the recently departed Jane Birkin, who stars in the film, Je T'aime Moi Non Plus, Serge Gainsbourg’s 1976 directorial debut, returns to UK screens and it's a chance to re-examine a film that demands you engage with it, for good and for bad.
One of the great lost traditions of British television, the BBC’s Ghost Stories For Christmas ran through the seventies and remain fondly remembered, a singularly British reading of classic horror stories.
After scoring a resounding early success, with his debut Love At First Sight winning the Best First Feature Film award at the Cesars, Thomas Cailley slipped into television and writing with his frequent collaborator Victor Saint Macary. Almost a decade after his first film, he returns with The Animal Kingdom, a film that sells itself as a political sci-fi but is far from it, and all the better for it too.
To this end, the existence of this film alone is heartening. Varda now sits at a place where a documentary like this can get green-lit; broad, populist, removed from the academic and cinephile discussions she was once the reserve of. Here we get Varda by those that new and loved her and her work; her family, fellow filmmakers and critics, and as such it’s by no means a deep dive, though enjoyable all the same.
Cleopatra Nouvelle Vague‘s Marc Collin adopts a fly-on-the-wall approach with Le Choc du Futur to transport you back in time to a synthetic studio in 1978, peeling back the years to remind us why electronic music truly matters. It’s difficult, if not perhaps impossible, to truly maintain a perspective on […]
Blue Underground Blue Underground‘s 4k restoration of Lucio Fulci‘s The House By The Cemetery is a handsome beast indeed. Cloaked in a faux-3D lenticular cover, it consists of three discs — two blu rays featuring the movie itself and a really quite ridiculous amount of extras, and a CD of […]
Demiurg / London 3 March 2019 This is a story of two enigmas. One is an inscrutable totalitarian art-rock collective, and the other is the most secretive state on Earth. And this is all about what happened when the two collided to the strains of a much-loved feel-good musical with […]
Cleopatra / MVD Visual Conny Plank and his circle were, as record producer David M Allen says: “The hippies who fell in love with machines”. * Much has been said about how the youth of Germany needed to reinvent themselves – and their art – at the end of the […]
Earth “There are some great female voices around now, but I’m not one of them, and I wish I was…” states Shirley Collins, sadly, on the opening of the LP to the sound of bonfire sparks, following it sincerely with “…but I believe when I was singing at my best […]
Cleopatra Entertainment Disney‘s Beauty And The Beast famously likes to call itself “a tale as old as time”, but traditional though a young girl marrying a lion may be in the circles YOU move in, I’d argue an older tale was that eternal staple of the cautionary tale, the tale […]