There’s a scene early on in Silent Running that nicely encapsulates the vibe the film. The technicians aboard the USS Valley Forge, one of four spaceships orbiting Saturn, are having lunch as they await an imminent radio order from Earth. Three of the spacemen are eating freeze dried...

Murder is, by definition, no laughing matter. So it’s disconcerting to hear the details of a particularly sanguinary killing, the roadside shooting of a Texas policeman, recalled and recounted by an array of jolly smiling faces. The Thin Blue Line was filmed in 1987 and revisits a...

“Personally I don’t trust Mexis.” “Personally I do. I’ve even forgotten the Alamo.” Boy, oh boy. Delmer Daves sure liked to subvert the stereotypes of the Western, didn’t he? After adapting Hamlet for the oater crowd with Jubal and showing that native...

The cop working his last case before retirement, the white colonist making arrogant demands of natives, the recently divorced private investigator caught in a tangled web, the superhero fighting the big bad guy and saving his girl. 2016 cinema certainly trod familiar paths but it was also...

That Mark Rosman worked prior to this picture with Brian De Palma should come as no surprise. The House on Sorority Row owes as much to that director’s work as it does to the Gialli that made such an impact on Italian cinema in the 70s and 80s. All the tropes are present: nubile young...

As Richard Nixon, Bob Halderman and every other politician caught in the wake of the Watergate break-in can tell you, it’s often not the original crime that will do you in but rather the cover-up. It’s a lesson that Mark Dixon, the cop at the heart of Where The Sidewalk Ends would...

The first time Rose spies the handsome Tommy Swann in It Always Rains on Sunday she’s smitten. She’s working the bar in an East End London boozer when the saloon doors open and Tommy sweeps in wearing a double-breasted suit, a hat tilted just so and a cigarette dangling from his...

You’re a new arrival in a small, suspicious town, having just ridden in with your pal from a long cattle run. While you are kicking your heels at the local saloon a breathless messenger arrives through the swinging doors. The local, much admired, ranch boss has been murdered and his...

The anthology film is a difficult beast to tame. For every Night on Earth there is a corresponding Four Rooms. Cinema may be forever blessed by Yesterday, Tomorrow & Today but it would also do well to forget Amazon Women on the Moon. By the very nature of the project, the tone of the...

You can almost imagine the scene as it played out, no doubt under the influence of hallucinogens and booze, in Rome some time in early 1978. Fellini’s cameraman on 8 1/2 looking to become a director in his own right and Italy’s answer to Roger Corman shooting the breeze about the...

How sweet it is to be a fan of Film Noir, to sit down of an evening to watch a Neo-Realist picture, a good one at that, and find as the reels unspool you’ve stumbled into gritty crime territory. How’s this for an opener? A couple of cons are on the run from a group of determined...