The critical consensus seems to be that Skyfall is the greatest James Bond movie ever. So, naturally, I had such major problems with it that it left me feeling irritated, despite having sat through all 22 of the previous movies – well, 23 if you count Never Say Never Again, or 24 if you include […]
It looks like I haven’t reported on my home viewing in quite a while, so looking back over my notes, there are far too many titles to comment on in detail. Some of these are films I’ve looked at again because of recent Blu-ray releases – the Alien series, for instance, and the Red Riding […]
The first time I saw Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of Stephen King’s third novel, The Shining, when it was released in 1980, I lined up for an hour to get into the Colony Theatre on opening night. Just as my friend and I were reaching the door, an usher came out counting heads; she dropped her […]
Pardon me for a moment while I put on my old fogey hat (once again!). This past week, I saw two old ’50s movies – one, a prestige studio production screened digitally on a big multiplex screen; the other a modest studio B production shown from a 35mm print on the smaller Cinematheque screen. And […]
The British legal system has something called the “appropriate adult”. This is a volunteer who’s brought in to observe interrogations when a suspect is deemed incapable of looking out for their own interests, either through some learning disability or other mental handicap. At the beginning of ITV’s two-part fact-based drama, Janet Leach (Emily Watson), a […]
I’m not sure what I should blame it on – the enervating effects of a long hot summer, the stresses of finishing my documentary, financial worries, early onset dementia – but I’m finding it increasingly difficult to drag myself out to a movie theatre these days, and for some reason when I do go, I […]
My project of revisiting all of Stanley Kubrick’s movies in chronological order has, once again, been stalled for some time, although the delay in looking at Barry Lyndon again has nothing to do with the kind of reluctance I felt with Spartacus. Rather, it’s just been difficult to find a clear window of three-plus hours […]
Winnipeg may have been put on the cinematic map by the international success of Guy Maddin, and there have occasionally been other interesting home-grown movies – the best feature ever made here, Greg Hanec’s Downtime (1985), is finally getting a DVD release sometime this year – but mostly, production in Winnipeg falls into the “service” […]
In the American southwest of 1909, an enforcer named Print (Aaron Stielstra) who works for a rancher named Mr. Paul (Montgomery Ford) justifies his work by transforming each killing into a kind of artistic statement. He likes to lecture his victims on the finer points of the meaning of life before finishing them off, then […]
After decades of neglect (at best) or even active suppression, the release of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) on DVD should be cause for celebration, particularly as it arrives in a 2-disk special edition from the prestigious British Film Institute. But the problems which have plagued the film since even before its release continue to […]