Yourself And Yours (2016)

This has happened before with a previous Hong Sang-soo movie where I just took the events at face value, and only later browsing other people’s reviews saw the different ways they were reading into it. Because what the film, Yourself And Yours (2016), covers is often so ordinary and everyday – people meeting at bars, […]

The Empty Beach (1985)

Bogie in Bondi. The Empty Beach (1985) is a neo-noir shot in Sydney during the mid-1980s, and based on a novel by Peter Corris, one of a series of books devoted to his detective character, Cliff Hardy. A commercial failure at the Australian box office, this is a boilerplate mystery. But what was satisfying to […]

Bloody Moon (1981)

Must a film be coherent? Eurohorror has so much to teach us. The American slasher genre filtered through Spanish director Jess Franco in gun-for-hire mode. Accentuated by watching the English dub where the voiceover artists are rushing through dialogue at a speedy clip, another layer to what is already alien onscreen behaviour. A group of […]

Venus In Furs (1969)

The meeting point between exploitation demands and arthouse pretensions is ideal cinematic terrain to my mind. Base pleasures that Venus In Furs (1969) – directed by Jess Franco – offers is nudity and sex (well, what accounts for it late 1960s international cinema) with Maria Rohm nude in a fur coat with stockings and a […]

Night Of The Ghouls (1959)

The seance scene. When the camera focuses on Dr. Acula (Kenne Duncan) – a granite-face middle-aged guy wearing a suit and a “swami” turban – sitting at a table, and the camera moves back so that we can see three people sitting on one side, and three rinky-dink skeletons sitting on the other, I was […]