Watching Betrand Tavernier’s sombre, moving Death Watch (1980) recently, I started wondering about mainstream filmmakers who tried their hand just once at science fiction. While Tavernier’s film fits in with the humanistic themes which run through his work, was there a similar thematic consistency in other directors’ forays into the genre? Shot mostly on bleak […]
I went to see the new Studio Ghibli release a couple of weeks ago. The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) is based on the Borrowers books by Mary Norton, mostly written in the ’50s. These stories of little people who live in the walls and under the floorboards of houses, “borrowing” unwanted scraps from the […]
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, […]
French filmmaker Francoise Romand debuted in 1986 with a remarkable documentary called Mix-Up ou meli-melo. In telling the story of two English families whose lives were tangled by fate when their babies were inadvertently switched at birth, Romand used a number of striking visual and structural techniques to evoke the psychological and class elements of […]
There’s still no recognizable pattern to my DVD watching, but maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. If my viewing became more systematic, it would probably start to feel like work. I finally finished getting through the British TV series Department S, which I mentioned a while back. It never really improved, though perhaps the production […]
If I’m in a room talking to someone and there happens to be a bookcase nearby, or a shelf of DVDs, I become easily distracted from the conversation as I try to read titles to get some idea of the other person’s tastes and interests. A similar thing happens when I watch a movie: if […]
Christopher Smith is an English director whose first feature, Creep (2004), was an attempt to emulate Gary Sherman’s Raw Meat (aka Deathline, 1973) and Douglas Cheek’s C.H.U.D. (1984); it had a woman trapped overnight in the London Underground, pursued by the mutant remnants of some medical experiments in a hidden lab, but it never quite […]
With the Steven Spielberg-Peter Jackson motion-capture version of Tintin due for release next Christmas, the British Film Institute has shown good timing in unearthing, and releasing on all-region DVD, the only two live-action movies ever made featuring Herge’s quiff-haired boy reporter. Apparently, Herge himself had been dissatisfied with previous animated adaptations and approved of plans […]