Ken Loach directs this touching story of childhood in a brutal coal town culture in the North of England, a film that is celebrated as a small cinematic treasure in Britain.
Tag: England
‘Death Line’ – cannibals in the underground on Criterion Channel and Shudder
Gary Sherman directs Death Line (aka Raw Meat) (1972), an underrated (and for years largely unseen) British horror film about the last survivor of a literal underground clan (trapped in a subway construction cave in a century before) who emerges from his cave to hunt for food on the London Underground. Yes, it’s a cannibal […]
‘Peeping Tom’ – Michael Powell’s subversive masterpiece on Amazon Prime and Criterion Channel
Michael Powell lays bare the cinema’s dark voyeuristic underside in his disturbing psychodrama Peeping Tom (1960). Handsome young Karlheinz Böhm (billed as Carl Boehm) is Mark Lewis, a shy, socially clumsy young man shaped by the psychic scars of an emotionally abusive parent, in this case a psychologist father (Michael Powell in a perverse cameo) […]
‘The League of Gentlemen’ – a very British heist on The Criterion Channel
Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960) is a sturdy and meticulous heist film built on an appreciation of teamwork, camaraderie and hard work: a professional work about professionals working. That’s the foundation of many a classic heist or men-on-a-mission thriller and this film offers it as a kind of skewed redemption for a misfit […]