This postwar curiosity, the debut feature of noted director Joseph Losey, is a mixed bag, combining both genuine poignancy and pointed satire -- "Would you like your sister to marry a man with green hair?" asks a schoolchild in a stray remark -- with a little too much Lassie-style syrup. On the plus side, there's some beautiful Technicolor cinematography, itself supporting the message of seeing the world in a more complex way (though, despite the variety of hair colours, which…

What kicks this up a notch from being a good film to a great film for me is the scene where Monty pressurises his best friend Frank into beating him up so he'll be less attractive to sexual predators in prison, while their close friend Jake looks on. What could have been an opportunity to indulge in sensationalist violence under cover of a superficial 'examination' of machismo and masculinity becomes a wrenching and emotional scene, extremely hard to watch not…

1001 films that will reward your time boxd.it/1FRRk (9th edition 2021).

At the birth of cinema, all films were experimental films, yet for a medium emerging in an era of rapid technological change and modernist thinking, the content of mainstream film-making rapidly succumbed to melodramatic Victorian moralising. While there were early examples of artists using the medium deliberately to challenge conventional ideas of representation and reality (Émile Cohl is an example: see Fantasmagorie (1908)), it wasn’t until the ‘rules’ of…