I recently started work on a documentary about the history of movie theatres and movie-going in Winnipeg. A brief article about the project in the Winnipeg Free Press has brought an amazing number of calls and emails from a wide range of people who have quite passionate memories of the old neighbourhood theatres and the […]
I recently re-read two of my favourite film books. The first was published in 1971, and I’ve read it maybe five times since then. The second was published twenty years later, in 1991, and I’d only read it once before, back in the early ’90s; I just read a reprint put out a few years […]
Guest blogger Howard Curle follows up his previous account of William K. Everson’s class on British Cinema at New York University with an in-depth look at one of the movies Everson introduced him to: John Baxter’s Love on the Dole (1941). John Baxter & Love on the Dole (1941) By Howard Curle One of the […]
In the past year or so I’ve seen five “evil kids” horror movies. Jaume Collet-Serra’s Orphan (2009) uses the classic “cuckoo” storyline: a couple with one young child decide to adopt a needy orphan, in this case a strangely moody girl. It’s not long before she begins to torment the couple’s biological child, not to […]
Forty years after Pauline Kael wrote her hatchet job Raising Kane (The New Yorker, Feb. 20-27, 1971), the myth of Orson Welles’ arrogance and failure is apparently still alive and kicking. In his August 13 column, Glenn Erickson over at DVD Savant passed on a link to a Wall Street Journal article by their resident […]
Criterion’s recent Blu-ray release of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris (1972) spurred me to watch the film again for the first time in almost a decade. I originally saw Solaris in London in 1975, my initial experience of Tarkovsky, and while I now recognize that it’s not his best work, I was enthralled. I’ve always liked films […]
A while back, I signed up with BlogCritics. The idea was that writing regular reviews for them would keep me from getting lazy; in addition, cross-linking with my blog would, I hoped, boost traffic for my own site. But I’ve only posted four reviews with them since February, while keeping up a regular weekly schedule […]
A few weeks ago, in a post about things I dislike in movies, I mentioned the death of narrative at the hands of modern communications technologies. I just came across this July 28 column by Joe Queenan in the Guardian on-line edition, in which he elaborates on the same issue. I’m glad to know I’m […]
Rapidly developing video technologies are altering not just our expectations but also our responses to the experience of watching movies. Blu-ray, hi-def TVs, the digital technologies which are used more and more in production – all have helped to create particular standards which many viewers now apply to virtually everything they watch. A lot of […]
Continuing my personal tour of Winnipeg’s vanishing downtown movie theatres … In the late ’70s, the city got its first multiplex. In the downtown Eaton Place mall, just across Graham Avenue from the Eaton’s department store, seven very small screening rooms were built just off the second floor food court (average capacity about 65 seats). […]