Continuing a brief survey of the past month’s disk viewing; sci-fi, horror and Archer, an animation discovery which is one of the best current series.
Notes on Recent Viewing, part three
Author: Kenneth George Godwin
Notes on Recent Viewing, part two
Continuing a review of the past month’s disk viewing; contemporary and classic thrillers, Czech animation, British cult TV, and a French dream of New York.
Notes on Recent Viewing, part one
A survey of recent viewing covers approaches to realism, metaphor, horror and war in a range of films from the 1920s to the 2010s.
Miklós Jancsó … and others: RIP
Word of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s untimely (and possibly drug related) death earlier today comes quickly after news of the (more timely) deaths of three European giants. Yesterday, award-winning Austrian actor Maximilian Schell died at age 83 in Innsbruck. The day before, the influential Hungarian filmmaker Miklós Jancsó died at 92, and just over a week […]
Ghosts of Television Past, part two
While some of the films and plays in the series of disks I wrote about last week, devoted to ghost and horror stories made for British television, reveal the budgetary and technical limitations of their time and medium (low budget sets, somewhat coarse and murky video recording), the BFI has lavished its attention on one […]
Ghosts of Television Past, part one
The English love ghost stories. There are the classics, of course – Hamlet and Macbeth, for instance – but after the advent of Gothic literature in the late 1700s, spirits, whether harmful or helpful, became less distant, increasingly incorporated into contemporary life. From penny dreadfuls to Dickens, ghosts impinged on the lives of characters not […]
The Lure of Paradise
If I had watched Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy a few weeks earlier, these three films would have made it into my year-end post as one of 2013’s highlights. I first encountered Seidl’s work (the documentary Animal Love and drama Dog Days) around the same time I came across Michael Haneke (The Piano Teacher and Time […]
The Pathology of Power:
Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Elio Petri’s 1970 masterpiece Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion provides one of the most incisive dissections of the pathology of power ever committed to film.
Year End 2013
Looking back over 2013, the most significant titles in my disk viewing have been imported from England or released by Criterion.
Genre On Disk, part two
The concept of genre is endlessly malleable, permitting filmmakers to borrow, invent, mix and match narrative elements to create a seemingly inexhaustible array of stories which combine familiar elements in new, or not so new, ways.
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