Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on June 6th, 2011
Looking for a something a bit different for you gangster flick fix? Then look no further than this box set of gritty, thematically linked Italian crime pictures from director Fernando Di Leo. Things don’t get much more delightfully 70s than this.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on May 17th, 2011
Clowns have been a recurring obsession for Fellini, by the director’s own admission, and after having been memorable presences in his films (perhaps most notably in La Strada), here they have an entire film devoted to them. Fellini here offers a mixture of biography, documentary and comedy. The film opens with a young boy (meant to be Fellini) first encountering (and being frightened by) clowns at the circus.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 10th, 2011
A stern, hectoring narrator laments the state of the Young People of Today’s Modern World, and ascribes their terminal amorality to their having come of age during the World War Two. Having set the stage, he then withdraws until the end, that we might draw the proper moral conclusions from a trio of tales (inspired, loosely, by actual cases) that show the terrible depths to which the Young People of Today’s Modern World have plunged.
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Posted in Disc Reviews by David Annandale on April 5th, 2011
Three years after her unsettling turn in Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971), Mimsy Farmer headlined this giallo-related effort by director/co-writer Francesco Barilli. She plays a successful chemist on the verge of a psychotic break. She has been haunted since her childhood by the death of her father, and she has recurring memories (or are they fantasies?) of her mother in the arms of a sinister man. Her sense of reality crumbles as objects and people from her past appear and vanish.
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