By 1964, Stanley Kubrick had been honing his filmmaking skills for more than ten years in a series of increasingly ambitious projects, all of which were somewhat conventional in terms of form and content – film noir, historical epic, war film. Even Lolita, although the subject matter pushed accepted boundaries, is recognizable as melodrama. For […]
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 […]
Dark Of The Sun (Jack Cardiff, 1968) The great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, responsible for the dazzling imagery of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), and Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), among many others, was also a director. One of my earliest […]
Back in the dark days before DVD, when elitists spent large sums on laserdisks because the quality was so superior to the ubiquitous VHS tapes of home video, the commentary track was born. This was a terrific innovation, enhancing the value of a movie by providing context and opinions from the actual filmmakers or from […]
Alexander Mackendrick (1912-1993), who was born in the United States but grew up in Scotland from the age of five, made only nine features between 1949 and 1969, when he took up a teaching position at the California Institute of the Arts. But within that limited output, he managed to create several masterpieces, including his […]