Powerhouse Films
Blu-ray Review: Missing
Most of the history taught in schools around the Cold War centres on tensions between the USA and the USSR and nuclear proliferation. However, the biggest destructive impact of this period was in the proxy wars fought in countries across the globe. Whilst Vietnam and Korea are the most famous examples, both sides were (often …
Blu-Ray Review: Footsteps in the Fog
Around the period either side of the Second World War, the environmental conditions in London proved conducive to a rather niche kind of film drama. The combination of severe pollution and adverse weather conditions periodically resulted in a dense fog which cast its pall over the capital. This culminated in the Great Smog of 1962 …
Blu-Ray Review: The China Syndrome
Jane Fonda was undoubtedly one of the most successful actors working in Hollywood during the 1970s. During that decade, she won two Oscars (for Klute and Coming Home) and was nominated for a further two gongs. With that success came great power and influence. Fonda was, and continues to be, active in many left-wing causes; …
Blu-Ray Review: Suddenly, Last Summer
Tennessee Williams was without doubt one of the greatest American playwrights of the 20th century. There are few, if any, dramatists who have had so much of their work adapted for the big screen. His plays have become synonymous with some of the greatest moments of American cinema. Taylor and Newman in Cat on a …
Blu-Ray Review: Little Murders
Jules Feiffer is a Pulitzer Prize-winning satirist and cartoonist who also won an Academy Award for best animated short for the film Munro. Whilst he achieved the majority of his fame as a cartoonist, Feiffer was also an accomplished author, playwright and screenwriter. As well as writing a number of his own plays, he’s scripted …
Blu-Ray Review: The Passenger
There is something deep down inside of every one of us which longs to escape our lives and become someone else. To throw off the shackles of our past, leave all our choices and mistakes behind and start afresh. It’s a very human yearning, but it’s more of a pipedream than an obtainable reality. Our …
Blu-Ray Review: Blue Collar
Richard Pryor was arguably the most influential, important and downright funny stand-up comedian of the last fifty years. His X-rated tirades on racial politics and current affairs wowed audiences around the world. His brand of storytelling revolutionised the medium. Pryor starred in a number of comedy films, most notably in Stir Crazy with frequent collaborator …
Blu-Ray Review: Charley Varrick
When we think about Walter Matthau today, it’s his great comedy roles which spring to mind. Comedy is what made him famous, and he was never better than when he was working in tandem with Jack Lemmon. Mattheu won an Oscar for his performance in Fortune Cookie, but it was another of the duo’s films …
Blu-Ray Review: Hammer Volume One: Fear Warning
Hammer Volume One: Fear Warning brings together four Hammer horror productions released in the first half of the 1960s. They are four very different tales of fear, curses, madness and the supernatural. In a genre and period when female actors were usually restricted to playing the victim or the damsel in distress, these films afforded …
Blu-Ray Review: Fragment of Fear
During the 1960s, David Hemmings was one of the most well-known faces of British acting. After his big break in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup, he became a pin-up and was regularly to be seen in the gossip columns of newspapers and magazines. Capitalising on this success, he starred in Barbarella, Camelot and The Charge of the …