Director: André Hunebelle
Cast: Jean Marais, Louis de Funès, Mylène Demongeot, Jacques Dynam, Robert Dalban,
Plot: Fantômas is a man of many disguises. He uses maquillage as a weapon. He can impersonate anyone using an array of masks and can create endless confusion by constantly changing his appearance.
Clearing the docket: Summer 2025, part two
Another eclectic selection of movies I’ve watched in the past few months, ranging from a politically nuanced spaghetti western to spectacular action, lush anime, a big-screen travelogue, various horrors from low to relatively high-budget, a […]
Clearing the docket: Summer 2025
Recent acquisitions from Arrow and Radiance cover a range of genres from Japanese B-movie crimes to traditional ghost stories, lingering traces of German fascism, a Poe adaptation filtered through pandemic anxieties, a pair of Italian genre […]
British fringe cinema from the BFI
Four releases from the BFI offer excellent presentations of a pair of features from the 1970s which didn’t leave much of a mark at the time but are well worth rediscovering – Richard Loncraine’s Flame (1975) and Simon […]
Personal landmark: my 1000th post
It’s hard to believe, but this is my 1000th post since I started writing this blog back in October 2010. Not having missed a single week since that first post – and often posting more than once a week – my writing here has been […]
Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985): Criterion Blu-ray review
Criterion’s new edition of Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil (1985) presents an impressive new 4K restoration which highlights the dense, endlessly inventive production design of Gilliam’s blackly comic dystopian vision of a […]
Theatrical viewing, early 2025
One of the benefits of retirement is being able to go to weekday matinees, which means seeing movies in almost empty theatres – the best way as far as I’m concerned. So this year I’ve already seen more movies than all of last […]
British archive television from Network
A pair of DVDs from the now-defunct Network Releasing unearth forgotten artefacts from British television history; The Frighteners, an anthology of concise half-hour psychological thrillers from 1972-73, and three one-hour dramas displaying the […]
The mind-bending paradox of Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007)
Nacho Vigalondo’s Timecrimes (2007) is one of the best – and most mind-bending – time travel paradox movies, a rigorous, darkly comic puzzle in which cause and effect are twisted in knots as a middle-class man finds his identity […]
The destructive power of fragile masculinity: Terence Fisher’s Four Sided Triangle (1953)
In 1953 Hammer Films took the first step on a path which would soon give the company an international reputation as a key purveyor of horror movies. Terence Fisher’s Four Sided Triangle, a modest production which combined science fiction, […]
David Cronenberg contemplates mortality in The Shrouds (2025)
In his latest film, The Shrouds (2024), David Cronenberg has made his most personal work since The Brood (1979), transforming grief into a meditation of mortality which, while at times uncomfortably revelatory, is nonetheless shot through with a […]