Reviews
A beacon of decent acting in a sea of ham and cardboard, Frank Lovejoy is the main reason to watch The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!), a dull, sanctimonious drama boosted by an incendiary finish. Fritz Lang had already turned the original true story into a film, Fury, but this is Cy … Read more
Phyllida Lloyd is most often described as the director of Mama Mia! but there’s a lot more to her than that. Take Herself, the latest in a line of strongly female-centred productions, including the Mrs Thatcher biopic The Iron Lady and the all-female Shakespeare productions of Julius Caesar, Henry IV and The Tempest at the … Read more
With Good on Paper, a film about a comedian, written by and starring a comedian who’s done a handful of specials for Netflix, Iliza Shlesinger appears to be walking in Amy Schumer’s shoes. She’s about the same age, blonde, Jewish and deploys a scalpel wit in comedy that veers between self-deprecation and attack. The “yeh, … Read more
A director on his way up meets a star on his way down in The Tall Target, a 1951 B movie about a plot to assassinate president-elect Abraham Lincoln in 1861, the year the American Civil War broke out. Anthony Mann directs, one year on from his breakthrough into the big time with the western … Read more
Overshadowed by both the Jean Epstein silent 1928 version and Roger Corman’s one from 1960, 1948’s The Fall of the House of Usher isn’t exactly a good film but it is a hellishly interesting one. Directed by Ivan Barnett, it was shot mostly at GIB Studios in Hastings on the south coast of England, a … Read more
A Hitchcock film that Hitchcock didn’t make, Ministry of Fear has the innocent man on the run, the dangerous/vulnerable blonde and a shadowy organisation pulling the levers in the background. Fritz Lang directed it, in mid 1943, but it took until mid 1944 before it was shown in cinemas (and even then it only happened … Read more
“The star was an alcoholic, the writer was an alcoholic, the producer was an alcoholic and the director was an alcoholic.” I cribbed that line from David Cairns’s loving write-up about this film. It’s a quote from Neil Innes, the musician who worked with Vivian Stanshall in the cult 1960s comedy outfit The Bonzo Dog … Read more
František Vláčil’s The Valley of the Bees (Údolí včel) got a fairly cool reception when it came out in 1968, even though his previous film, Marketa Lazarová, had been a success. Maybe they followed too hard on each other – Bees came only four months after Lazarová. Maybe the same 13th-century setting failed to hit … Read more
“Inspirational coach” movies come in many shapes and sizes. This one comes in the shape of Samuel L. Jackson, the tough talking, clean-living paragon of virtue who comes into a troubled school and turns around the basketball team in the teeth of indifference from pupils, teachers and … sorry, am I boring you? There’s a … Read more
A nice 95-minute advertisement for a company still with us, 1941’s Western Union is appropriately both a western and about the Union, being an adaptation of a Zane Grey story about how the west was won, or at least connected up to the rest of the United States, by telegraph wire. In linking coast to … Read more
The title of EM Forster’s novel is parodied in Room Without a View, for reasons which never really became clear to me, but then on looking back over my notes to this episode I realised I could remember barely any of it. Some things I do remember, though, such as the bare bones of the … Read more
The Tin Drum won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980, as well as the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 1979. Not everyone was enamoured, though. While the Los Angeles Times thought it “a masterwork of cinema” and the New York Times slightly less effusively reported that it “compels attention,” Roger Ebert of … Read more