Film Features
Oscars 2025: long day's journey into 'Anora'Monday, 03 March 2025
Amid these troubling times, can we not all live in the world of the 2025 Oscars' runaway success story, an ever-smiling Sean Baker? That thought increasingly crossed my mind as the 97th Academy Awards crawled towards its close, a promise early on from host Conan O'Brien not to "waste time" abandoned more or less as soon as it had been spoken. Read more... |
David Lynch: In Dreams (1946-2025)Monday, 20 January 2025
David Lynch’s final two features mapped a haunted Hollywood of curdled innocence and back-alley eeriness. Mulholland Drive (2001) seemed the ultimate LA noir, till Inland Empire (2006) dug into deepest Lynch. The eighteen fallow big-screen years preceding his death this week show the loneliness of his vision in his medium’s conformist capital, which he nevertheless adored. “It’s kind of a trick in the light [that] is magical,” he said of his adopted hometown’s allure. Read more... |
Best of 2024: FilmThursday, 26 December 2024
Saskia Baron Anora Between the Temples Io Capitano Dahomey Emilia Perez Green Border Io Capitano Monster A Normal Man Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat Read more... |
Documentary highlights from the 2024 London Film FestivalSaturday, 26 October 2024
One of the many pleasures of the London Film Festival is the chance to see high-quality documentaries on the big screen. If lucky, these films might get a brief, specialist cinema release, but all too often non-fiction features are destined for TV. Seeing them projected full-size in the dark with a live audience sharing the experience is a far better way of gauging their impact than watching them alone in a living room. Read more... |
The law's sick voyeurism - director Cédric Kahn on 'The Goldman Case'Saturday, 21 September 2024
The trial of the left-wing intellectual Pierre Goldman, who was charged in April 1970 with four armed robberies, one of which led to the death of two pharmacists, was known as “The Trial of the Century” – even though the century wasn’t over yet, as one of the prosecutors quipped. Read more... |
The Micro Golden Age of Mid Eighties Fantasy FilmsSaturday, 03 August 2024
“When we hear the formula ‘once upon a time,’ or any of its variants,” wrote Angela Carter in her introduction to her Book of Fairy Tales, “we know in advance that what we are about to hear isn’t going to pretend to be true. We say to children: Don’t tell fairy tales!’ Yet children’s fibs, like old wives’ tales, tend to be over-generous with the truth rather than economical with it.” Read more... |
Best of 2023: FilmTuesday, 26 December 2023
Numbers indicate if entries are listed in order of preference
Anatomy of a Fall Broker Fallen Leaves Joyland Killers of the Flower Moon Otto Baxter: Not a F**ing Horror Story Return to Seoul St Omer Scrapper A Thousand and One Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: The ComposersFriday, 22 December 2023
Unlike, say, Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Michael Powell’s working relationships with musicians were cordial, particularly his collaborations with composers Allan Gray and Brian Easdale. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: A Celtic storm brewingWednesday, 20 December 2023
“Nothing is stronger than true love,” a young laird says to a headstrong young woman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (1945), his voice heard above the sounds of wind and waves. She replies, “No, nothing.” Read more... |
Michael Powell: a happy time with Bartók’s BluebeardTuesday, 19 December 2023
In his final years Michael Powell mooted the possibility of a Bartók trilogy. He wanted to add to the growing popularity of his work on Bluebeard’s Castle, the deepest of one-act operas, an idea he had previously rejected of filming the lurid "pantomime" The Miraculous Mandarin and, as third instalment, not the earlier ballet The Wooden Prince but a film about the composer’s time in America and his return, after death, to Hungary. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: In Prospero's RoomSaturday, 02 December 2023
There’s a thread of bright magic running through British cinema, from Powell and Pressburger through Nic Roeg, Derek Jarman and Lynne Ramsay, and it’s wrapped around Jarman’s last home like fisherman’s rope. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: the glueman comethSaturday, 11 November 2023
The shop assistant turned World War Two Land Army girl Alison Smith, clad in a summer dress on the sabbath, steps through a glade onto a hilltop track above the village of Chillingbourne in Kent. It’s the same road once taken by medieval pilgrims riding to seek blessings or do penance at Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury Cathedral. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: Spy mastersTuesday, 31 October 2023
Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell are, almost certainly, Britain’s greatest directors. Hitchcock was slightly older, and entered the film business earlier; in fact, Powell worked as a stills photographer on Hitchcock’s Champagne and Blackmail, in the late Twenties, shortly before making his own films. Read more... |
Powell and Pressburger: Battleships and ByronSaturday, 28 October 2023
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger made a glorious run of movies from The Spy in Black (1939) to The Small Back Room (1949). Yet the duo’s reputation went into steep decline in the 1950s, and they began to encounter difficulty in securing finance for projects. Read more... |
Michael Powell interview - 'I had no idea that critics were so innocent'Tuesday, 24 October 2023
Michael Powell fell in love with his celluloid mistress in 1921 when he was 16. It’s a love affair that he’s conducted for 65 years. At 81, he’s not stopped dreaming of getting behind the camera again. At Cannes this year he hinted at plans to make a silent horror film, but he’s reluctant to talk about it. Read more... |
Martin Scorsese's 'Mean Streets' - a triumph of personal filmmakingMonday, 23 October 2023
Ask someone to pick their favourite moment from a film by Martin Scorsese, something defining. Read more... |
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