Fighting Social Ills: Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard
In Akira Kurosawa’s Red Beard (Akahige, 1965), Dr. Niide (Toshiro Mifune), called “Red Beard”, offers medical treatment cheaply or for…
Recent Posts
Best of the Decade: 2015-2019
Part two of our Best of the Decade feature runs the gamut, from animation (Kubo and the Two Strings, Loving…
Best of the Decade: 2010-2014
How does one go about choosing the best films of the year, let alone of the decade? Several of our…
Film Noir Style: Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy
As the clocks turn back and the weather turns cold, I turn back to my favourite genre, film noir, transforming…
War as absurdity: Kihachi Okamoto’s Desperado Outpost
Desperado Outpost (Dokuritsu gurentai, Japan, 1959) starts with shots of a man on horseback in a landscape reminiscent of a…
He Wore Black
Henry Fonda gone bad, one of cinema’s most memorable endings with two of the greatest outlaws on screen fading into…
Overstepping genre boundaries: Séance and Séance on a Wet Afternoon
Bryan Forbes’s Séance on a Wet Afternoon (UK, 1964) starts with mystery-filled images of a séance; Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Séance (Korei,…
Screengem: The ‘Comanche Uprising’ fictional movie poster from… Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (Quentin Tarantino, 2019)
While very much a buddy movie, thrilling potboiler and rambling revisionist period piece, at its core Once Upon a Time…
Double Feature: Speed (1994) and Paterson (2016)
First of all, credit for highlighting the potentiality of this double feature must go to my friend Rachael Jones, who…
