Posted in British Film, Directors, Stars, Style, War films on May 22nd, 2008 1 Comment »
The 26th of May is something of a red-letter day in the DVD release calendar. Whether this is because of a conjunction of the planets in the far-distant heavens or some sinister international conspiracy of art-house DVD labels, I don’t know. But whatever the reason, there’s a whole bunch of films released that day which […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, Stars on Apr 7th, 2008 No Comments »
As Daniel Day Lewis collected his Oscar last month, there was one name absent from his roll call of thank-yous. Not a major omission by any standards, but maybe it would have been appropriate for the newly anointed Best Actor to acknowledge the spectre that hovers above There Will Be Blood, the film for which […]
Posted in British Film, Directors, Stars, Style on Mar 4th, 2008 No Comments »
Given that relations between Britain and Russia hover somewhere distantly below freezing point at the moment, I wonder how the Russians received Eastern Promises. It’s fair to say that this (ostensibly British) thriller doesn’t show its Russian villains in an entirely positive light. I wouldn’t want to be the projectionist who shows it to Vladimir […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, Lists, Stars, The Future of Film on Feb 27th, 2008 No Comments »
Hi, glad you could make it. Take your seats. The fight’s about to start. In the red corner, there’s Mark ‘Lethal’ Lawson. He wrote a piece for The Guardian recently, saying how future generations will regard ours as a golden age of movies, comparable to the 1940s and the 1970s. He cited things like No […]
Posted in Hollywood, Stars on Jan 2nd, 2008 2 Comments »
One of the more depressing bits of news to filter out of Hollywood in 2007 was that our friends the studios have decided not to make any more dramas with female leads. This has been on the cards for a while, after a string of underperforming films starring the likes of Nicole Kidman, but after […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, Stars, Style on Dec 11th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve been thinking a lot about ‘style’ recently, not least because I’ve just re-watched six of the seven films Josef von Sternberg made with Marlene Dietrich. As you might have read in my previous post, they’ve overwhelmed me somewhat: you don’t write posts that long unless you’re besotted.
Sad to say, I’m not finished yet. That […]
Posted in Directors, Hollywood, Stars, Style on Dec 4th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve been going through the 18 disc Marlene Dietrich: The Movie Collection. It’s a big box filled – as I suspect you’ve already guessed – with 18 films which feature Marlene Dietrich in some capacity. At the time of writing, MovieMail are offering it for about sixty notes, which makes it the bargain of the […]