Eusébio buying soul LPs in Harlow's Startime record shop in 1968

This is what I've been doing with my time recently. Can't remember when I last enjoyed helping to compile a festival retrospective programme so much. These films are subversive, outrageous, WTF & bonkers, a full complement of extraordinary horror & sci-fi classics that deserve to be rediscovered.

Requiescat, Frederick Wiseman. My man had Foucault-levels of things to say about the role of institutions in our lives, but was also a hugely talented filmmaker on top of it. If you have not seen Titicut Follies (1967), prioritise it: right out the gate, our guy was NOT here to fuck around

Finally getting round to watching SMILEY'S PEOPLE (1982), and strangely finding it easier to recall a time of Cold War intrigue and pre-internet analogue telecommunications than I am one in which the Palace Theatre had something on other than Harry Bloody Potter:

Something compelled me to make this

Once again, we have given new life to an old book. @backlisted.bsky.social @regretteruane.bsky.social

Been itching to read Joan Barfoot's Gaining Ground / Abra since @regretteruane.bsky.social's appearance on @backlisted.bsky.social a while back, so delighted to spot that Faber is reissuing it later this year: www.foyles.co.uk/book/gaining...

The only thing I’ve seen in the last ten years that has given me hope for the future.

Rare Elio Petri film alert! Stars Marcello Mastroianni and Gian Maria Volonté; music by Ennio Morricone. (Probably helps if you're au fait with 1970s Italian politics; I am not, but loved it anyway - the blocking! the design! It's like an arty, almost abstract, intellectual slasher movie!)

People from outside Ireland occasionally ask me, "Why is Bono, an international music titan from Ireland, not all that loved in Ireland?". The answer in its entirety is a complex one, but "He sent Dolly Parton a birthday cake and put his own name on it" goes a long way to summing it up.

I am very excited to announce that I'm going to be hosting a Miskatonic Institute lecture on March 16th, and I'll be talking about the Trans Feminine Grotesque. Full details below: miskatonicinstitute.com/events/gazin...

Philip Glass leading by example, withdrawing a premiere from the Kennedy Center

Nine years to the day since Graham Linehan foresaw his own fate.

this is the only way to appreciate someone playing a bitchin guitar solo

Joan Greenwood on the Isle of Barra in Scotland during a break from location filming for Whisky Galore! (1949)

Béla Tarr visiting a store in Peru selling pirated DVDs and posing with the owner and bootlegs of his own work, one of the realest ones, RIP

Fuck it I don’t care anymore

Here we go: TCM REMEMBERS, 2025 edition. See if you can make it through this without getting something in your eye.

The Norwich Cathedral Cat, on the pulpit, drinking from the glass of water left for the Reverend. “He lives here” we were told, as if the church had had no say in the matter and his presence pre-dated the building. “He’s named Budge because he doesn’t budge. He thinks the water is left for him”

Where's Emi Martinez when you need him? #WorldCupDraw

If you're looking for an Udo Kier film to watch, may I recommend BACURAU (2019), starts off like a worthy slice of sociopolitical realism and ends up as demented Brazilian neo-western exploitation. Don't read anything else, just see it. Contains one of my favourite film moments of the 21st century.

If I said the last of the great twentieth century British film directors died last night, and very few people even remembered him by the time of his death... would you know what I'm talking about? tribunemag.co.uk/2025/10/cryi...

Truly heartwarming to see the world of magazine publishing covering increasingly diverse interests

🧵I've posted them before, but here's my thread of horror/kids' TV double-bill cinema posters. Happy Halloween... #halloween #cinema #graphicdesign #poster

🚨Public Service Announcement Jan Švankmajer's wonderful wonderful LEKCE FAUST (1994) is currently available on YouTube (HD transfer, original Czech with English subs) if you want to treat yourself... www.youtube.com/watch?v=adZp...

Paul Eddington in ‘Crash’ for Thames Television, 1974. celluloidwickerman.com/2025/10/24/t...

The entire "free speech on campus" moral panic was manufactured to blackmail us into making space in intellectual life for bigots and charlatans who couldn't get there on their own merits. Its a DEI scheme for fascism. Congratulations to everyone who took it at face value.

I took this picture of Olga and László in London in 2018. Congrats to Krasznahorkai and his translators, including George Szirtes and @ottiliemulzet.bsky.social, and long live a Central Europe free of dictators (foreign and domestic) and full of magnificent minds like these!

Happy October—here’s a list of 100 avant-garde horror films I recommend, and links to watch the large majority of them.

New intake of Bristol University students so far not disappointing - just overheard one making reference to their old school chum "Marmaduke" #Marmaduke

Ellis Rosen is becoming one of my absolute favourite cartoonists.

Robert Redford playing a gentle incarnation of death, coming for a frightened old woman in The Twilight Zone episode "Nothing in the Dark" (1962). An extraordinary performance then, terribly bittersweet today

A giant has left us. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/16/m...

I always think a hundred thousand fascists on the streets is a good time for a nominally left-wing prime minister to say something other than “I get it, I too have a flag in my house”

every time there's political violence discourse i think about how jo cox was assassinated in broad daylight by a fascist who shouted "britain first" as he shot her, and now nine years later her party is dedicating every moment in power to placating the ideology of her murderer

Hey #FilmNoir fans! Want to know what we're screening at this year's #FilmNoirFest in #Weston?! (31/10/2025 - 02/11/2025)! Well... here you are! Please, do spread the word. We recommend buying our festival pass early to avoid disappointment. More info: ti.to/film-noir-uk...

On Anna May Wong for the Guardian www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

The Future, created by Betty Bebbington c.1965, in the art therapy studio at Netherne hospital in Surrey where she was compelled to live. This is one of a small number of her mostly abstract surviving works, several of which feature these drifts & vortices of darkness with notations in her own hand

Delighted to be part of this forthcoming @indicator.bsky.social box set of Columbia Pictures' British noirs, with an essay on Warwick Films' West Berlin-set crime drama A PRIZE OF GOLD (1955): www.powerhousefilms.co.uk/collections/...

Going to have a Holter monitor test to see what's been giving me heart palpitations, which I'm imagining is like the film CRANK (2006) if CRANK (2006) involved Jason Statham "eating slightly too many carbs" and "getting out of a chair too fast"

I saw Terence Stamp interviewed at the BFI some years ago. There was a pause after each question that never felt like an awkward silence. Rather he was thinking very carefully about both the question & his answer, which was always worth the wait. I came away admiring him even more than I did already

A cracking list from @marbleicehook.bsky.social. The Czech time-travelling farce Tomorrow I’ll Wake Up and Scald Myself with Tea (1977) is the most delightful Hitler-related film you're ever likely to see.

Original painting: art, deliberate, soulful AI 'exploration' of original painting: not art, ghoulish, inhuman, emperor's new clothes Putting the Doom UI over it: art, intentional, hilarious, human, quietly profound

This is incredible

I promised myself that I'd only post on here if I had something to say, and I think this counts: I'm thrilled to share news of my forthcoming book, "The World of Black Film: A Journey Through Cinematic Blackness in 100 Films". Out 12 Feb UK/17 Feb US via Laurence King Pre-order! linktr.ee/_Ash_Clark