The King Of Marvin Gardens (1972)

The post Easy Rider era of 1970s American cinema was a mythologised time when major studios produced depressing dramas about losers (though mainly white male losers). Fitting right into that sub-genre is The King Of Marvin Gardens (1972), which was director Bob Rafelson reuniting with Jack Nicholson after the success of Five Easy Pieces; I’d […]

The Brood (1979)

After hearing Edgar Wright talk on a podcast about how disturbing the school teacher scene was in David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), I was compelled to finally watch it, which you can too if you have access to SBS OnDemand (along with another Cronenberg classic, Scanners). Fuelled by Cronenberg’s own divorce at the time, this […]

One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (1977)

When Agnès Varda passed away, shamefully I’d not seen any of her films. Seeking to correct such an oversight, I sought out One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (1977; L’une chante, l’autre pas), a narrative that follows the friendship between two women, which comes to symbolise feminist movements of the 60s and 70s. As teenagers, Pauline […]

Night Moves (1975)

Night Moves (1975) is an underrated example of the neo-noir genre of the era. Alongside Chinatown and The Long Goodbye, these films paid tribute to 1940s noir while investing everything with a post-Watergate feeling of disappointment; in Night Moves, for example, there’s a scene where characters talk about where they were when JFK was killed. […]

The Outfit (1973)

While I’ve not read any of the Richard Stark (alias for Donald E. Westlake) novels about Parker, the anti-hero criminal thief with his own code, the character has served several film adaptations, the most acclaimed being Lee Marvin in Point Blank (less so, the recent and boring Statham/J-Lo caper movie, Parker). Another treatment of the […]