D. A. Pennebaker was one of the founders of direct cinema, working with people like Richard Leacock and the Maysles brothers, Albert and David, to free documentary from the limitations of the voice-of-god narrator and didactic purpose. Their idea was that documentary should merely observe and record events, with no narration to impose interpretation. But […]
After decades of neglect (at best) or even active suppression, the release of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) on DVD should be cause for celebration, particularly as it arrives in a 2-disk special edition from the prestigious British Film Institute. But the problems which have plagued the film since even before its release continue to […]
My parents knew Charles Lightoller, 2nd Officer on the Titanic; these photos show my father on a trip to Calais in 1939 with the Commander.
To mark the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, just as James Cameron releases a 3D version of his 1997 moneymaking behemoth, Criterion has brought out a new edition of Roy Ward Baker’s A Night to Remember (1958), still the best version of the story. The two-disk DVD (also available on Blu-ray) offers a […]
Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder (1959) is the quintessential courtroom drama. Looked at now (in an excellent Blu-ray edition from Criterion) as a perfect expression of its genre, it may even seem formulaic in light of everything that’s been seen since its release. The crime, of course, is murder. Who did it is not […]
As usual I seem to be out of sync with the current pop culture climate – of the most recent movies I’ve gone out to see, I enjoyed a colossal box office bomb, had serious reservations about the year’s biggest success to date, and most appreciated a low budget genre movie by a first-time director. […]
I used to like Mel Gibson, particularly in his early, Australian period. I’m still a big fan of the Mad Max trilogy (1979-85), and although they may not seem quite as impressive now as when they were first released, Peter Weir’s Gallipoli (1981) and The Year of Living Dangerously (1982) are both still worth watching. […]
Procrastinating over several reviews I should be writing, I sat down to watch a cheap exploitation double bill last night: Wes Craven’s The Hills Have Eyes: Part 2 (1985) and Alan Birkinshaw’s Killer’s Moon (1978), both recently issued on Blu-Ray by Kino Lorber. The Hills Have Eyes: Part 2 (Wes Craven, 1984) Hills is Craven’s […]
Anthony Burgess wrote his short novel A Clockwork Orange in 1962 as a way of coming to terms with the rape of his first wife. It may seem odd then that the book takes the first person point of view of Alex, a 14-year-old boy, who commits numerous crimes, including rape and murder. In addition, […]
I went to see the new Studio Ghibli release a couple of weeks ago. The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) is based on the Borrowers books by Mary Norton, mostly written in the ’50s. These stories of little people who live in the walls and under the floorboards of houses, “borrowing” unwanted scraps from the […]