Marion Lennox is due for her own Great Depression as she crashes from one Rocky relationship into another. The film’s fault is in its Victorian morality, a story that must have seemed misogynist in 1930 and hasn’t aged well since.

Marion and Bertie are wealthy siblings who rage against their status quo: both wish to marry for love but are not prepared for the responsibility. Marion upsets her parents by breaking off her engagement with Lord Rockingham (jokingly referred to…

A loyal cop’s impotent marriage yet strident morality is juxtaposed with a psychotic criminal’s divorce from prison: two men, each alone, who haunt the night streets of Manchester like poltergeists. Director Val Guest’s film noir is bleak and violent, allowing the pugnacious Stanley Baker as the heroic Inspector to reveal his darkest rage one moment then struggle in anguish the next, a conflicted cop who is only trying to do the right thing. It’s a fucking wonderfully nuanced performance!

Don…

A swan song of two humans, a final pronouncement of love: one whose spirit is divided by the aching lure of modernity, and another whose devotion is drowned in the cold depths of despair. Amidst the angry breaking waves and shrouded moonlit rendezvous’, one man almost sacrifices his integrity for a brief respite from patriarchal routine, his thick hands that once tilled the fields of his lovely wife now weapons of her demise until his senses return and they attempt…

COME AND SEE is the most brutal and disturbing war film ever made: we experience Florya’s fiery baptism from boyhood into insanity. Director Elem Klimov shows us the horror of the Great Patriotic War untainted by Western propaganda (or at least its ignorance).

Klimov films in a tight 4:3 frame and packs every shot with information: we are not spared the bodies, the slaughter, the deep wailing sorrow, and the emotional filth of war. His close-ups into vacant eyes and…