Craig Ian Mann

Saw this last Saturday and it’s the standout of the year so far for me. Performances are fucking incredible.

Title card for The Man in the Back Seat (1961), with the title written in white block capitals against the leather seats in the back of a car.

Picked up the BFI’s new release of Strongroom and absolutely loved supporting feature The Man in the Back Seat. Incredibly nippy at 57 minutes(!), it’s a very tense crime thriller that follows two petty crooks desperately trying to offload their injured victim without getting caught. Great stuff.

Slipcase artwork for the Eureka / Masters of Cinema release of The General. Packaging design by Nick Wrigley.

Slipcase artwork for the Eureka / Masters of Cinema release of Cécile is Dead. New artwork by Sean Phillips.

Slipcase artwork for the Eureka / Masters of Cinema release of Trace of Stones. New artwork by Carly A-F.

Eureka's May titles have just been announced, all of them a total blast to work on: Buster Keaton's masterpiece The General on 4K UHD, an excellent and underseen outing for Inspector Maigret in Maurice Tourneur's Cécile is Dead and Frank Beyer's controversial Trace of Stones, one of DEFA's finest.

Gen Z is reviving DVDs and Blu-rays, with local video rental shops reporting record months and membership numbers as young people embrace physical media.

Read more: www.latimes.com/entertainmen...

Two things that will make me think very carefully about whether I really want to read a book are the present tense and the second person.

Top 10 Blu-rays (UK) for February 2026 Another month - is it February already? - another packed release schedule in 1080p blu-ray land. Lets see which ones are worth picking up, shall we?

It has made my day to see Eureka's release of Jakob the Liar – the only East German film to ever be nominated for an Academy Award – top the @avforums.bsky.social list of Top 10 Blu-rays for February 2026. It was a genuine honour to produce this one and I'm really very proud of it.

Cover art for the Chasm Films release of Taxidermia (2006), featuring art by John Dunn. A man (Marc Bischoff as Lajoska Balatony) stands naked in front of a green painted background. His body is painted in hues of green and red. There is stitching down his chest and his right arm is raised in the air. Subtle lines separate his lower arms and his head from his body.

We've been working on Chasm Films, a new home video label dedicated to underground world genre cinema, for ages – so it's great to see our first release announced with huge thanks to @filmsradiance.bsky.social for hosting us. Taxidermia is beautiful, bonkers and a world Blu-ray premiere. Pick it up.

Three large rectangular signs affixed to the side of a grey apartment building read “MARTIANS LOVE LAW.” The signs are white with blue text outlined in red. Residents are hanging red and blue flags from nearby windows. A television camera is visible in the bottom right of the frame.

Of all the new-to-me films I watched last year, the one I think about most often is Piotr Szulkin's War of the Worlds: Next Century. A radical approach to the familiar alien invasion narrative about the evils of media manipulation (and martians obviously). Available on disc from Radiance.

It's from before my time at Eureka – so I can confidently say I agree with you!

Thanks Johnny! Yeah, White Mare is a cracker. If you have the disc, the extra feature and the shorts all worth watching too.

It is, yes. Next one up will be Son of the White Mare, date TBA. Potentially some others to follow. Danger: Diabolik unlikely as we don't have theatrical, it's a Paramount film (which is not to say it couldn't just be booked from Paramount by anyone who wanted to screen it).

I had a blast talking about the mighty Rear Window (a personal all-timer) with @fatscoleman.bsky.social for @top100pod.bsky.social. I really love this film and hope it comes across in our discussion.

Still on Rarewaves at £26, which beats the £30+ on ebay.

💥NEW EPISODE!💥This month Tim is joined by @craigimann.bsky.social from Eureka Entertainment to discuss Alfred Hitchcock's REAR WINDOW (1954). Available wherever you get your podcasts.

A photograph of Peter Lorre about to hit Santa Claus with a baseball bat.

Merry Christmas!

a poster for absolute cinema shows a man sitting in a chair ALT: a poster for absolute cinema shows a man sitting in a chair

Ho ho ho and Merry Christmas! With so many classic films screening on UK television over the Christmas period, I thought I'd start a thread of what to look out for over the coming days...

Long shot, but if you have a VPN try setting it to a location outside of the EU. A website that normally doesn’t ask me for age verification did so this morning in compliance with some new EU regulation or other so I popped over to Canada and no problem after that. May not help but worth a go!

If they are I have already deleted it from my short term memory…

Just done the ritualistic flick through the seasonal Radio Times and pleased to see that 1) the BBC has remembered films made before 1980 and 2) New Year’s Eve on BBC Four is wall-to-wall Jaws programming. What better way to welcome 2026 than watching Jaws 2.

Packshot of the Eureka Classics release MARTIAL LAW: LO WEI'S WUXIA WORLD, featuring THE BLACK BUTTERFLY (1968), DEATH VALLEY (1968) and VENGEANCE OF A SNOWGIRL (1971). Artwork by Grégory Sacré (Gokaiju).

Great to see a Eureka release make it onto the Sight and Sound Discs of the Year (in the current issue of the print magazine) for the second year running. A very fun one to work on, co-produced by myself and Jacob Milligan.

Picture of William Finley as the title character in Brian De Palma's Phantom of the Paradise (1974).

Phantom of the Opera is then followed a little later by Phantom of the Paradise with a more detailed intro – I'll be talking about Phantoms on-screen from 1925 onwards, including this cult classic. Tickets here: showroomcinema.org.uk/film/too-muc...

A picture of Lon Chaney in The Phantom of the Opera accompanied by text reading: THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA & LIVE SCORE BY HARMONIEBAND 30 NOVEMBER 2025 SHOWROOM CINEMA

As part of the BFI's Too Much season celebrating melodrama, The Phantom of the Opera is screening at the Showroom Cinema in Sheffield on Sunday 30 November with an intro by me and a live score by HarmonieBand. Grab a ticket, it'll be a one-off experience!: showroomcinema.org.uk/film/too-muc...

Had a rewatch of this a couple of nights ago for the first time in maybe ten years. I can’t stand Tom Cruise but Michael Mann is a god tier filmmaker and I can’t deny that this is basically a perfect movie. Cruise clearly born to play an emotionless psychopath…

The phantom that birthed Hollywood monster movies: The Phantom of the Opera at 100 Released 100 years ago, Lon Chaney’s grotesque yet sympathetic turn as The Phantom of the Opera marked a primordial moment in Hollywood history when melodrama morphed into horror and Universal noticed...

I wrote a piece for the BFI on the mighty Phantom of the Opera, which turns 100 years old in 2025. Phantom is currently screening around the country as part of the BFI's Too Much season celebrating melodrama.

Masters of Cinema releases of Shogun's Samurai (cover art by John Dunn) and Prison Walls: Abashiri Prison I–III (cover art by Tony Stella).

Prizes up for grabs before tomorrow's Masters of Cinema screening of Message from Space at the Showroom, Sheffield: Shogun's Samurai (not even released until Monday!) and our collection of the first three films in the excellent Abashiri Prison series. Tickets: showroomcinema.org.uk/film/masters...

It seems to be one of those films where it's a criminal offence to have a nuanced or middling opinion on it, which is always fascinating. It is either GREAT ART or TOTAL TRASH.

A picture of a space ship from Kinji Fukasaku's Message from Space, accompanied by the text: MASTERS OF CINEMA PRESENTS MESSAGE FROM SPACE 15–16 NOVEMBER (PG) / DIR. KINJI FUKASAKU

Next weekend, Masters of Cinema presents Kinji Fukasaku's Message from Space (often unofficially called Japanese Star Wars) at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield. This is such a fun film, recommended to any fan of science fiction or special effects cinema. Tickets: showroomcinema.org.uk/film/masters...

Illustrated poster for Relay (2024), featuring the images of stars Lily James nd Riz Ahmed above the New York City skyline and a telecommunications machine for the deaf. The tagline reads: NO CALLERS ARE IDENTIFIED NO CONVERSATIONS ARE RECORDED NO PHONE RECORDS ARE KEPT. NOW SPEAK CLEARLY AND WHEN YOU ARE FINISHED SAY: "GO AHEAD."

Went to see Relay yesterday, which is both one of the best films I've seen at the cinema all year and one of the most surprising. A proper old-fashioned paranoid suspense thriller with shades of The Conversation and Enemy of the State. They don't (very often) make them like this anymore.

102 - Werewolves on Film (with guest Craig Ian Mann)

And then we had a howling good time on the podcast with our guest @craigimann.bsky.social to talk about the history of Werewolves on Film: open.spotify.com/episode/5TOy...

The screen in Screen 4 at the Showroom Cinema, Sheffield. A slide is displayed in red with white text that reads: CELLULOID SCREAMS SHEFFIELD HORROR FILM FESTIVAL 23–26 OCTOBER 2025 SHOWROOM CINEMA PRESENTED BY ARROW VIDEO

Poster for Descendent, featuring a man facing away from the viewer, silhouetted as they look into a bright light in the sky; this image is reflected in the eye of a non-human creature resembling a deer.

Poster for Head Like a Hole, featuring a man in a white shirt and black tie on a red background. His face is replaced by a hole, in which we can see another man wearing a white shirt and black tie, sitting on a chair. The tagline reads: "Work yourself to death."

Poster for Silver Screamers. Several older men and women are facing the viewer, a man at the front holding a camera. The tagline reads: "Lights! Camera! Arthritis."

A great weekend at @celluloidscreams.bsky.social (15 years on from my first, which is wild). Highlights: Descendent (alien abductions and familial dramas), Head Like a Hole (a modern Outer Limits episode about bullshit jobs) and doc Silver Screamers (in which senior citizens make a horror movie).