Kim Longinotto and Marc Isaacs are two English documentarians whose subjects differ widely, but who share a fascination for the small details of people’s lives.
Recent Documentary Viewing, Part 2
Tag: British Film
Guest post: David Lean’s The Sound Barrier (1952)
Howard Curle recalls another formative experience with William K Everson’s class at NYU in the ’70s; The Sound Barrier, a key film in David Lean’s career
Aspect Rati-woes
In his review column today, DVD Savant Glenn Erickson, in the course of writing about an interesting East German thriller from the ’60s, mentions that the disk has been mastered at a ratio of 1.85:1 although the film was shot and released at 2.25:1. In other words, despite the fact that it’s been released by […]
Compulsive Viewing: A Personal Pathology Part 2
Continuing my survey of one month’s movie viewing: Red Dawn (Dan Bradley, 2012): As dumb as John Milius’ original about small town American kids fighting against vicious invaders. Milius had Nicaragua(!) taking over the States; here it’s North Korea backed by, for some reason, the Russians (aware of how much U.S. debt is held by […]
Compulsive Viewing: A Personal Pathology Part 1
I usually only have time to write once a week for this blog, and my occasional obligations to Blogcritics (i.e. the free review copies I get through them) have pushed me into the habit of doing reviews more often than more general posts about broader topics (which was what I actually anticipated when I started […]
More Recent Disks From England: The Return of Flipside
After three years of steady releases, for some reason the BFI suspended their Flipside series last May. Now, after an eleven month break, they’ve released two new titles, as unexpected as anything which has come before. In John Krish, they’ve returned to a filmmaker familiar from a number of previous BFI releases, while in B.S. […]
Recent Disks From England
Basil Dearden’s The Bells Go Down, which I wrote about last week, is just one of a number of disks I recently received from England. Maybe it’s a bit of nostalgia, but the past few years I’ve been digging back into British film – partly seeking out titles I have memories of from long ago, […]
Blu-ray Review: The Awakening (2011)
In the past few years, something interesting has been happening in the horror genre. After several decades of increasingly graphic movies focused on the torture and destruction of the human body, something more subtle has been re-emerging. Like it or not, one of the key instigators of the trend was The Blair Witch Project (1999); […]
Additional Recent Viewing …
Beasts of the Southern Wild (Benh Zeitlin, 2012) I watched Benh Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild just before it landed several Oscar nominations, and my reaction was quite mixed. The film has an impressive visceral power, anchored by the remarkable performance of 5-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis as Hushpuppy, the determined little girl who lives in […]
Michael Winner 1935-2013
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 […]
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