The Sword Of Doom (1966)

All I knew about the Japanese movie The Sword Of Doom (1966) was the iconic image of a samurai in the middle distance of a forest, submerged in fog and surrounded by bodies felled by his sword. I didn’t realise that the film’s main character was an embodiment of evil. Ryunosuke Tsukue (Tatsuya Nakadai) is […]

Knock Off (1998)

Director Tsui Hark’s gift to cinema: a POV shot of a foot going into a shoe. A knock off shoe that we receive extreme close ups of the wear and tear suffered as Jean Claude Van Damme pulls Rob Schneider on a cart in a competitive race through the streets of Hong Kong. And this […]

Conquest (1983)

After listening to the recent Pure Cinema Podcast episode on Fantasy movies, I was keen to submerge myself into some 1980s era sword-and-sorcery flicks. One title they talked highly of, and that I’d heard good word for some time, was Italian horror maestro Lucio Fulci’s entry into the post-Conan genre, Conquest (1983), an Italian-Spanish-Mexican co-production, […]

Last Man Standing (1996)

Last Man Standing (1996), Walter Hill’s remake of Yojimbo (already remade as A Fistful Of Dollars), is almost mythical yet reductively basic. Set in a ghost town named Jericho that nobody else lives in except for two gangs fighting over the same turf, a state of purgatory only destabilised by the arrival of a gun-for-hire […]

Mona Lisa (1986)

Bob Hoskins searching for a mystery woman through peep shows and seedy clubs to the sounds of Genesis’ ‘In Too Deep’ is such an iconic 1980s neo-noir moment. Mona Lisa (1986) is directed by Neil Jordan and earned accolades and awards for Hoskins’ performance as George, a small time crook released from prison after a […]