Japan’s legendary Studio Ghibli is, of course, best known for the epic animated fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki. Although most of these films focus on young characters with appeal to children, the films themselves are complex and deal with serious, mature themes. Less prominent are a handful of films which have no fantasy elements – in […]
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. […]
While waiting for a review copy of Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend to arrive recently, I dipped into the French New Wave to watch a few films I’d previously missed – Claude Chabrol’s first two features, Le Beau Serge and Les Cousins, and Agnes Varda’s Le Bonheur. Although Varda started her career before any of the Cahiers […]
Dr Stein (Mike Daneen): Love demands courage. Lisa (Peggy Neal): Yes, that’s the lesson Guilala taught me. Finding myself off work for a day with some nasty kind of flu bug, by a strange coincidence the mailman knocked at my door and delivered the Criterion Eclipse set, When Horror Came to Shochiku. Given my pitiful […]
Quentin Tarantino has formidable filmmaking skills, rooted in his deep knowledge of movies famously acquired during his years as a video store clerk. His ability to create images, to build fluid visual progressions and elaborate displays of action, is complemented by a savant’s dazzling knack for exhilaratingly wordy dialogue rich in non-narrative tangents and the […]
One of the things I like about Criterion’s Eclipse series is the lack of snobbery in their choices. Yes, there are serious selections like the early Ozu films and Naruse’s silent works, Louis Malle’s documentaries, Jean-Pierre Gorin’s trilogy of essay films and the early Bergmans … but the people behind the line have shown a […]
Jean-Luc Godard wasn’t the first of the Cahiers du Cinema critics to start making movies, but his debut feature, A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), was the one which most clearly announced the arrival of the nouvelle vague. Where Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and others were stretching the possibilities of conventional narrative form, […]
In the past couple of years Olive Films has released an eclectic variety of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, from noir to comedies, exploitation to obscure indie dramas – recent releases include Bresson’s The Devil, Probably alongside Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming! But for me, one of their most interesting releases is a fine Blu-ray edition […]
It was seven years after The Shining before Stanley Kubrick released his next film. Even given that Full Metal Jacket was two years in the making, that still leaves a long gap, perhaps indicating the difficulty he had in both finding the right subject and securing financing, even though the King adaptation had been reasonably […]
These days, the kind of movies that once were made quickly and cheaply for the drive-in circuit are given big budgets and A-list stars. It no longer seems strange that an actor of Liam Neeson’s stature is turning up in something like Taken 2, a formulaic action-revenge movie. But back in the heyday of drive-in […]