Popular Features
100 Years of… The Big Parade
King Vidor’s first name really was King. It suited him. The master of the big Hollywood movie, here he is in 1925 with The Big Parade, laying down the template for all the war movies of the future. The Big Parade is the highest-grossing silent film of all time so it would be nice if we still had the original version. But it’s been lost. Instead there’s the 1930 re-issue – same movie but with sound effects and a score added. It’s the basis of the restoration done in the 1980s, which replaced the original score with one by Carl Davis. How good the film looks. It’s fabulously sharp, in fact, apart from the … Read more
Isn’t It Iconic?
La Dolce Vita might not be the best Italian film ever made. Or the cleverest, steamiest or most gripping. But it is the most iconic. Here’s why… Just a touch over 50 years ago the assembled critics at the Cannes film festival gave Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita a standing ovation. Not at the end of the film, or even at the moment when Anita Ekberg gets into the Trevi fountain, its most remembered scene. No, what got them to their feet was the film’s opening shot. It’s of a huge statue of Jesus Christ being airlifted out of Rome, the Eternal City. It doesn’t look like much now but back then this … Read more
100 Years of… Robin Hood
Accept no substitute. This is the original Robin Hood, or Douglas Fairbanks in Robin Hood (as the registered title insists), the one that Errol Flynn’s 1938 version modelled itself on, the one that gets all the Merry Men, Maid Marian, good King Richard and bad King John, Sir Guy of Gisbourne and the Sheriff of Nottingham into forms so recognisable that even at 100 years old, it’s instantly obvious who is who. This wasn’t the first screen outing for the mythical character, in fact there had already been five before (if we include 1919’s My Lady Robin Hood), so Robin Hood as a movie character was at least fairly well known, though of … Read more
The Best Films of 2014
Of the 350+ films I saw this year, these are the best ones. Some of them were released last year and I’ve been a bit slow getting round to them. Some of them were released even longer ago. The criteria are – I watched them in 2014 and I liked them. That’s it. The Best Computer Chess (2013, dir: Andrew Bujalski) Andrew Bujalski, inventor of mumblecore, proved there’s life in the old beast yet with this retro-verité drama about geeks meeting in the 1980s to pit their programs against a chess-playing computer. Shooting on original video cameras in fuzzy-edged boxellated black and white, Bujalski catches the moment when the let-it-all-hang-out era died and our … Read more
10 Best Films of 2025
In a year packed with 1990s revivalism, noir resuscitation and franchise exhaustion, these are the films I liked the most in 2025. I’ve attempted to avoid the obvious but not be wilfully obscure and have probably succeeded at neither. Without further ado, with links to full reviews, here goes – in 1-10 order. Dying (dir: Matthias Glasner) A German black comedy so bleak you might laugh out of desperation, following a pair of oldsters as they reach the end of the road, and their two appalling adult children. Superbly underplayed by a top-notch cast, it’s a novelistic, dense, all-enveloping wallow in human misery, three hours long and worth every minute of the grief. … Read more
Dick Van Dyke on DVD
What a great thing Dick Van Dyke has been. First there’s that improbable name. Even more improbable, it’s his real name. Then there’s his legs, long and lean and made for comedy dancing and comedy pratfalls. And his smile – as wide as the screen and surely the biggest on TV, if we’re not counting that of Mary Tyler Moore, who played his screen wife. We tend to think of him as a TV performer – no less than three TV series have been named after him, including the seminal Dick Van Dyke Show of the 1960s, the direct descendants of which (via Mary Tyler Moore and James Burrows) are Friends and The Big … Read more
100 Years of… Flesh and the Devil
Flesh and the Devil was Greta Garbo’s third Hollywood movie after arriving from Europe aged 20 in 1925, and it’s the one where everything suddenly clicks. She has the right director (Clarence Brown), the right director of photography (William H Daniels) and the right co-star (top-billed John Gilbert aka The Great Lover). Originally it was meant to be Lillian Gish in the lead, but Garbo got the job because she was cheaper. The massive success of Flesh and the Devil made Garbo bigger than Gish, Swanson and all of the rest of them, bigger even than any studio. From this moment on she could write her own ticket. With total total control she … Read more
What Is an Aseptic White Room Thriller?
The simple answer to the question “what is an aseptic white room thriller” (AWRT) is Cube, Vincenzo Natali’s cult Canadian sci-fi movie from 1997. More abstractly, it’s a film that takes place on a single set, usually white though not necessarily. Lighting will be clean, clinical, fairly devoid of shadow. Soundtrack music will be scarce or absent. As for sound design, a background hum of air-conditioning is standard. Clanking, the whooshing of doors, “noises off”. It’s the plot that is most definitive. In the AWRT no one really knows what’s going on. Typically the film opens with the characters who don’t know each other waking up somewhere far from home, to find that … Read more
100 Years of… Sherlock Jr.
Buster Keaton’s masterpiece Sherlock Jr. wasn’t that successful when it debuted in 1924. Audiences didn’t laugh that much. Critics also didn’t think it was that hilarious – “far and away about the most laughter lacking picture that “Dead Pan” Buster has turned out in a long, long while,” said Variety. Even Buster Keaton seemed rueful about it when later interviewed – “alright but not one of the big ones”. There is something in those verdicts. It isn’t a massively funny film but there is so much conceptual and theoretical brilliance on display here that it doesn’t matter. Variety’s review also reckoned Sherlock Jr. wasn’t a patch on Harold Lloyd. But Keaton here is … Read more
The Razzies – Winners Who Showed Up
One supposedly represents the best of the best and the other the worst of the worst. In theory the Oscars and the Razzies are polar opposites, yet they have something in common. Each loves a pile-on. Every year as awards season comes around again, a fog seems to descend on the members of the voting academies, groupthink sets in and some perfectly OK but largely unremarkable movies start mysteriously migrating – up to become Academy Award contenders, or down to where the Razzies await. If a bona fide celebrity is involved, the movement can be quite dramatic. Was Driving Miss Daisy really the best picture of 1990? Against, say, Do the Right Thing? Did … Read more
100 Years of… The Strong Man
Two people do special things in 1926’s The Strong Man. The first is director Frank Capra, inventing film language on the hoof in his feature debut and showing us why he was such a force on the 20th-century film scene. The other is Harry Langdon, demonstrating an ability to animate dead space with his fluid features and expressive body. The story is really a case of the tail wagging the dog and it takes a long time to get to the film’s point – elaborately conceived and expertly executed stunts. First there’s a preamble in the Great War, where Harry’s hapless soldier Paul Bergot is taking potshots at Germans with his catapult in … Read more
Popes on Film
When I first wrote this intro Pope Benedict had just hung up the red papal slippers. Now, revisiting it 12 years on, Francis has come and gone and now Pope Leo XIV is the Vicar of Christ in Rome. It sets the mind a-wandering. Who are the great popes of cinema? Oddly, this is a harder question to answer than you might think. For starters, there are many films that feature a pope at the edge of the action but very, very few are actually about the supreme pontiff himself. Though the pope is held in contempt in some quarters, he tends to get a rather easy ride in the movies, possibly because … Read more
