I actually got out to see three movies in the theatre in January. Surprisingly, I liked all of them. Haywire (2011) by Steven Soderbergh Over the years, I’ve found Steven Soderbergh’s work to be very hit-and-miss. When he’s good (from my point of view) he’s very good; when he’s off (again from my point of […]
In light of what I posted here yesterday about my discovery of the films of Theo Angelopoulos, it comes as a particular shock today to hear that the great director died yesterday in a road accident while working on his latest feature. This represents the loss of a towering talent, one of that select group […]
Film festivals create a peculiar psychological space, lifting you out of “reality” and immersing you in a subjective world where what you see up there on screens in dark auditoriums becomes more important than anything else – even eating and sleeping seem to become irrelevant. The Toronto International Film Festival Having lived mostly in Winnipeg for […]
At the height of the Cold War official propaganda was aimed at lulling the population into accepting the idea of nuclear war as somehow normal and “manageable”, as depicted in the Central Office of Information short The Hole in the Ground (1962) which shows no-nonsense bureaucrats getting on with the job of “maintaining order” during an attack on Britain.
As readers and viewers, we tend to be greedy. We want access to everything a creator may have done, regardless of that creator’s wishes. If an author dies leaving an unpublished manuscript, we expect to be given access to it, even if the author him- or herself had clearly stated that it wasn’t ready to […]
Not surprisingly, given the amount of time I spend watching movies at home, I came across quite a few worthwhile titles during the year. I’ve already written about many of these in this blog, so will just offer capsule comments here (in no particular order) about ones that I particularly recommend. Dramatic features The World, […]
Although I watch more films now than ever before, I hardly ever get out to a movie. Twenty years ago, before I paid much attention to home video (I didn’t own a VCR until 1995!), I saw about 120 movies a year in theatres. This past year, barely 30. But with DVD and Blu-ray, I […]
Lionel Rogosin is generally referred to as a documentary filmmaker. He himself rejected the label, saying several times in the documentaries accompanying the three features in the Carlotta DVD set that he saw himself following in the steps of Robert Flaherty and De Sica, constructing dramatic neo-realist narratives out of real situations. While there is […]
The announcement that Milestone will be releasing Lionel Rogosin’s On the Bowery next February reminded me that I still hadn’t got around to watching the three-disk set of Rogosin’s work that I bought in Paris in the summer of 2010. I’d never heard of Rogosin at the time, but the packaging immediately caught my attention […]
I’ve been hung up for a few weeks in my plan to re-watch all of Stanley Kubrick’s films in chronological order because the prospect of sitting through Spartacus one more time was a bit daunting. There was a three year gap between the success of Paths of Glory and this, the biggest production of Kubrick’s […]