Blu-ray: Buck Roger in the 25th Century (1979-81) The success of Star Wars at the cinema in 1977, not only began a series of similar ‘space themed’ movies being released onto the big screens worldwide, but also rejuvenated the genre on television too. Battlestar Gallactica ran from 1978-79 and was created by the great Glen […]
DVD: Save Me (2018) Save Me is a six-part British television drama serial, written by and starring Line of Duty & The Walking Dead’s Lennie James. The series stars James as Nelson ‘Nelly’ Rowe, an alcoholic scumbag, who wriggles out of sticky situations with his charm and whose life is turned upside down when Jody, […]
DVD: Threads (1984) I remember when Threads was originally broadcast here in the UK in 1984. For weeks afterwards it was the main topic of conversation at work: would you prefer to be incinerated in the initial blast or survive? Would making a survival shelter out of your doors actually do anything practical? Would humanity […]
DVD: The Parkinsons – A Long Way To Nowhere (2016) A documentary about a band I’d never heard of, who play a genre of music that I dislike. From that opening sentence alone, you may already have an idea of what my opinion will be of The Parkinsons: A Long Way To Nowhere. However, much […]
Blu-ray & DVD: Jungle (2017) In the early 1980s, an Israeli adventurer named Yossi Ghinsberg (Daniel Radcliffe) travels to Paz in Bolivia as a sort of rebellion against his strict dad (told in flashback). There, he meets Marcus Stamm (Joel Jackson), a Swiss school teacher, and Marcus’s friend Kevin Gale (Alex Russell), another traveler and […]
DVD: Lucky (2017) Knowing that Lucky was released just after Harry Dean Stanton’s death makes it all the more poignant. Seeing his hang-dawg face and big puppy eyes, this couldn’t be a more fitting farewell. Unsympathetic, yet mystical, Lucky does a jerky old man walk through life, repeat and fade, scared of death, and coming […]
DVD: Walk With Me (2017) Otherwise known as ‘Shhhhh, be quiet and still’. Opening with new members of the… sect? community? Having their heads shaved you can immediately see that these people are extremely happy to be losing their hair as the massive smiles and look of … peacefulness, is palpable. It’s quite nice to […]
DVD: Run Chrissie Run! (1984) I have to admit that I wasn’t expecting a low budget ozploitation movie to begin in London, but the opening sequence filmed there sets up the narrative that will follow. IRA member Michael Riley (Michael Aikens) reneges on killing a man and ends up shooting a fellow IRA member instead, […]
DVD & VOD: Score – A Film Music Documentary (2016) Music is well known for affecting your emotions, and none more so than in film scores where it accompanies and enhances the visual action playing out before you. The themes from Rocky, Superman, and the The Good, The Bad and The Ugly are all ingrained […]
Blu-ray: The Passenger (1975) While containing more dialogue than many of director Michelangelo Antonioni’s previous movies, The Passenger still focuses the majority of its narrative on the visual rather than the auditory. The camera follows the character of Locke (Jack Nicholson) like a ghostly apparition, committing his every move onto celluloid in what at times seem […]