Michael Winner, who died on Monday, didn’t get a lot of respect as a filmmaker. Best known for his Death Wish movies and other violent thrillers starring Charles Bronson, he seemed like a crass commercial opportunist. The Death Wish films, particularly the first, were efficient appeals to the audience’s baser instincts, which, like Clint Eastwood’s […]
I recently dipped into the French New Wave to watch a few films I’d previously missed – Claude Chabrol’s first two features, Le Beau Serge (1958) and Les Cousins (1959), and Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur (1965).
Dr Stein (Mike Daneen): Love demands courage. Lisa (Peggy Neal): Yes, that’s the lesson Guilala taught me. Finding myself off work for a day with some nasty kind of flu bug, by a strange coincidence the mailman knocked at my door and delivered the Criterion Eclipse set, When Horror Came to Shochiku. Given my pitiful […]
A few days ago I spent the evening with four friends at our annual get-together to discuss what we had seen during the past year. Back when I was first invited to join the group years ago, there would often be heated arguments about the particular merits of this or that movie, but we’ve all […]
Quentin Tarantino has formidable filmmaking skills, rooted in his deep knowledge of movies famously acquired during his years as a video store clerk. His ability to create images, to build fluid visual progressions and elaborate displays of action, is complemented by a savant’s dazzling knack for exhilaratingly wordy dialogue rich in non-narrative tangents and the […]
One of the things I like about Criterion’s Eclipse series is the lack of snobbery in their choices. Yes, there are serious selections like the early Ozu films and Naruse’s silent works, Louis Malle’s documentaries, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s trilogy of essay films and the early Bergmans … but the people behind the line have shown a […]
Jean-Luc Godard wasn’t the first of the Cahiers du Cinema critics to start making movies, but his debut feature, A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), was the one which most clearly announced the arrival of the nouvelle vague. Where Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and others were stretching the possibilities of conventional narrative form, […]
Although my documentary on Winnipeg movie theatres was originally conceived as a one-hour show, I ended up interviewing almost thirty people who gave me more great material than I could possibly fit into that format. As a result, the project grew to feature length. But even then, there were interesting stories and observations which simply […]
In the past couple of years Olive Films has released an eclectic variety of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, from noir to comedies, exploitation to obscure indie dramas – recent releases include Bresson’s The Devil, Probably alongside Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming! But for me, one of their most interesting releases is a fine Blu-ray edition […]
Like most people who grew up with them, books mean more to me than simply the words they contain. I bought a Kindle last year, and I have dozens of books on it, but mostly it sits untouched on a shelf. I’ve only really used it on my trips to Beijing last year and England […]