My first encounter with Stanley Kubrick’s work came before I was ten years old. Sometime in the early ’60s, my parents took me to see Spartacus, probably at the Odeon in Chelmsford. For years afterwards, two things stuck with me: the gladiators training in a kind of cage and Jean Simmons, holding her baby, riding […]
In my rather long film-going life, I have often been out of sync with generally held opinions. I didn’t much like the Star Wars movies when they transformed popular culture, I found myself laughing at Titanic while surrounded in a crowded theatre by sniffling people who bought into it completely … So it doesn’t surprise […]
Of the two Scott brothers, I’ve always had a preference for Ridley. No doubt the writers of Cinema Scope would attribute this to my innate middle-brow pretensions, but I’ve never managed to grasp their argument for Tony’s superiority (editor Mark Peranson on Unstoppable: “it is the key Hollywood film of this typically weak quarter, thanks […]
Although Britain’s Hammer Films was first formed in the 1930s, initially in an attempt to expand a theatre chain into areas of production and distribution, only five films were made before the war – comedies and mysteries. Production resumed after the war with more comedies, mysteries and thrillers. It was 1953 before the company took […]
It was unfortunate that until the very end of his career, the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku was known in North America mostly for his worst film: The Green Slime. This was an “international” production, shot in Japanese studios with an American and European cast, a very bad script and even worse special effects. But even […]