Mark Cousins

My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock

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Hitchcock with his fingers splayed

Mark Cousins’s documentary My Name Is Alfred Hitchcock steers a careful course between low and high culture, the crass, “did you know” approach to the great director and the earnest film studies route. Hitchcock understood the importance of fun. The result is an engaging, interesting, entertaining and enlightening 120 minutes, not the last word in Hitchcock, but a lively addition to a library which, in my view, could not get full enough. “A showman, a daredevil, a fun fare,” says Hitch in a film entirely written and narrated by him, or so it’s claimed at the outset. In fact that’s all a bit of a lie. Cousins wrote the script that impressionist Alistair … Read more

The Storms of Jeremy Thomas

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Jeremy Thomas and Mark Cousins en route to Cannes

The Storms of Jeremy Thomas is a documentary for people who enjoy the sort of films that Jeremy Thomas gets involved with. The likes of The Sheltering Sky, Sexy Beast, Crash, High-Rise, 13 Assassins or The Dreamers. Smart, good-looking, slightly offbeat stuff, not arthouse exactly – his films are too starry for that. But not your Pixars, or Disneys, or Marvels or Foxes. Thomas is the producer or executive producer behind all of those movies, plus a long run of critical and box office successes going back to the 1970s. A “searingly bright” man of “great taste”, “totally playful” who can be “very serious”, says Debra Winger. “The dream producer… the enabler… so rock’n’roll,” … Read more