Theatrical viewing, early 2025

Paddington leads the Brown family on an adventure in Dougal Wilson's Paddington in Peru (2024)

One of the benefits of retirement is being able to go to weekday matinees, which means seeing movies in almost empty theatres – the best way as far as I’m concerned. So this year I’ve already seen more movies than all of last year or the year before . But that also means I’ve seen a few movies I probably wouldn’t have bothered with before. Among the duds, though, have been some good – or at least interesting – movies I’m glad I saw on a big screen.

British archive television from Network

Colonel Waley (Alfred Burke) enforces conservative traditions in the exclusive Hunters Club in Nigel Kneale's Ladies' Night (Herbert Wise, 1986)

A pair of DVDs from the now-defunct Network Releasing unearth forgotten artefacts from British television history; The Frighteners, an anthology of concise half-hour psychological thrillers from 1972-73, and three one-hour dramas displaying the range of the influential writer Nigel Kneale – The Crunch (Michael Elliott, 1964), a political thrillers, Ladies’ Night (Herbert Wise, 1986), a satirical comedy about a conservative establishment crumbling in the face of feminism, and Gentry (Roy Battersby, 1987), in which a bourgeois couple cashing in the decline of an East End community are confronted by the anger of those being displaced.

Dipping a toe into the online stream

The Terror and the Erebus sail into danger seeking the Northwest Passage in the Ridley Scott-produced adaptation of Dan Simmons' novel The Terror (2018)

Until fairly recently I’ve avoided streaming – I like nothing better than handling physical media, taking small shiny disks out of their case and putting them back on the shelf as part of my collection after watching their contents. But various factors have been pushing me towards rethinking my collector mentality and in the past few months I’ve found myself mixing and increasing amount of streaming into my viewing. This has included a number of (limited) series as well as quite a few older and newer movies. And I’ve become aware that I haven’t been writing about these shows because – that collector mentality again – I have kind of ghettoized them: somehow I haven’t taken a streamed movie as seriously as the ones I own. So perhaps it’s time to consider them here…

A zombie romance, Nazis vs vampire, and sex and death in a Manhattan highrise from Vinegar Syndrome

With the end of my Vinegar Syndrome subscription, I’ll be getting a lot fewer disks from them this year, but there are still a few leftovers from last year to consider – I won’t miss things like Phillip Noyce’s Sliver (1993), but without the subscription I might never have seen Fred Burnley’s romantic-horror oddity Neither the Sea Nor the Sand (1972). Only a brand-new 4K restoration of Michael Mann’s flawed second feature, The Keep (1943), gives me a twinge of regret. Still, although I’ll have to be much more judicious about ordering without the subscription, hopefully there’ll be other interesting releases like this in the future.

Fall 2024 viewing round-up, part two

FBI trainee Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) faces two serial killers in Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

A pair of Jonathan Demme features and several box sets are among my Fall movie watching, featuring various genre titles ranging from the Hollywood prestige of The Silence of the Lambs (1991) to the cheap regional horror of Doug Robertson’s HauntedWeen (1991), early ’70s Brit exploitation including Jack Palance sacrificing women to an African idol in Freddie Francis’ Craze (1974) and four Lucio Fulci and Umberto Lenzi made-for-television ghost stories in Cauldron’s Houses of Doom collection.

Blasts from the past

Indicator’s Hammer Vol. 4: Faces of Fear

Combat! Television’s Last “Good” War

Sam Peckinpah’s swansong: The Osterman Weekend (1983)

More late winter viewing, part one

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