The completist impulse is a key element of the collector’s mentality. For instance, I have forty-nine of Hitchcock’s features on DVD, plus his two Second World War propaganda shorts and season one of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. It’s not that I like all his films – in fact, I know I won’t ever watch some of […]
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.
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, […]
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 […]
Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports (2010) began as a couple of shorts (2003 and 2005) which were a success on the Internet. In the form of industrial training films, they depicted the hunting, taming, and training of wild Santa Clauses in Northern Finland. These are strong, rather vicious creatures which end up being marketed around the […]
Nostalgia can be an odd thing. As I’ve been working on my documentary about the history of movie-going in Winnipeg, and thinking about how much time I spent in the old theatres which no longer exist, and what it felt like to sit down in the dark to see something I’d heard or read about […]
You could make an interesting double bill out of Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown (2009) and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block (2011). Both are set in crime-ridden British housing estates where residents are terrorized by youth gangs, both have a gritty tone which strives to create a sense of relevance and immediacy. But while they have […]
Since reading Chris Fujiwara’s book about Jacques Tourneur, The Cinema of Nightfall (Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore and London, 1998), I’ve been searching out films by the director, particularly ones unconnected with the genres he’s best known for, horror and noir. I recently got hold of a cheap VCI disk featuring a double bill of […]
There are always risks involved when revisiting a movie that impressed you years ago, when you were a lot younger and no doubt more arrogant but less wise. But it’s hard to resist taking the chance. Last year I was pleasantly surprised to find that Andrew Marton’s Crack in the World was not only just […]