The Kid Detective (2020)

Tone is such a tricky thing to get it right, particularly when you are juggling tones while blurring genres. The Kid Detective (2020) begins with a goofy premise – a kid detective (like Encyclopaedia Brown) who solved neighbourhood crimes, now a washed up adult still solving “cases” – and eventually becomes one of my favourite […]

Burnt Offerings (1976)

“Get out of that dang house!” is what you might yell at the screen while watching Burnt Offerings (1976), a haunted house movie with a cult following, not as well known as either The Amityville Horror or The Shining. One reason to see it is the pairing of two actors in their 1970s heyday, Oliver […]

Seven Days In May (1964)

After experiencing the fantastic WW2 action thriller The Train, I was keen to see more of the movies that director John Frankenheimer and actor Burt Lancaster made together. Seven Days In May (1964) was filmed in 1963 before The Train was made, but experienced a delayed release after the assassination of JFK. A political thriller […]

Deadly Fight In Hiroshima (1973)

Another Lewis Rice O’Donnell recommendation, The Yakuza Papers are a five film series of gangster movies directed by Kinji Fukasaku (Battle Royale) based on news stories and journalists covering the post-war era. Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight In Hiroshima (1973) aka Hiroshima Death Match is the second movie in the series, and our […]

Orpheus (1950)

I knew little of Jean Cocteau (what a cultural barbarian I am!), mainly that he was a poet and an artist, and I’d always heard about his version of Beauty And The Beast with Jean Marais. When Mubi had Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950; aka Orphee) in their library as part of their French Cinema spotlight, also […]