Mannaja (1977)

I was sold by the first few minutes of the spaghetti western, Mannaja (1977) aka A Man Called Blade, when a fugitive runs through a foggy, misty forrest and is attacked by a silhouetted bounty hunter – Blade (Maurizio Merli) – whose whole thing is that he uses hatchets as a weapon. However, I think […]

Rancho Deluxe (1975)

Rancho Deluxe (1975) is a hang-out movie but also a wavelength. Whether you enjoy it or not is dependent on your taste for something plotless, loose and low-key. Plus if you find a young Jeff Bridges and a young Sam Waterson to be a charismatic pair of actors to hang out with (though you will […]

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 […]

I Am Sartana, Your Angel Of Death (1969)

I was not familiar with the Sartana spaghetti westerns until Arrow Video released a boxset, their remastered versions available on Tubi to stream. The first one I watched was I Am Sartana, Your Angel Of Death (1969; Sono Sartana, il vostro becchino), the second in the series, and what a character, dressed in all black […]

Bacurau (2019)

This was one of the films I was looking forward to most this year and it’s a shame it’s not received a Perth or Australian release yet. For those who have a VPN, you could stream it from the Criterion Channel. I read up too much on the Brazilian-French co-production Bacurau (2019) and its narrative […]