An 11-year-old orphan, discovered working in a maharajah’s stables by a cameraman on a scouting trip, represents one of the strangest anomalies in the history of movie-stardom. Osmond Borradaile was in India in preparation for a project based on a story by Rudyard Kipling when he met Selar Shaik and brought him to the attention […]
By 1964, Stanley Kubrick had been honing his filmmaking skills for more than ten years in a series of increasingly ambitious projects, all of which were somewhat conventional in terms of form and content – film noir, historical epic, war film. Even Lolita, although the subject matter pushed accepted boundaries, is recognizable as melodrama. For […]
In the 1950s, after he broke up with long-time partner Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis made a string of very successful comedies built around his, shall we say, distinct comic persona. Jerry’s schtick was a mixture of elaborate, agile physical business combined with an aggressive use of facial and vocal tics, which at their mildest were […]
After the experience of directing Spartacus, Stanley Kubrick got as far away from Hollywood as he could. He moved to England, where he stayed for the rest of his life and made his eight subsequent features. Interestingly, the first two of those films were both set in the United States, as if despite making the […]
I actually got out to see three movies in the theatre in January. Surprisingly, I liked all of them. Haywire (2011) by Steven Soderbergh Over the years, I’ve found Steven Soderbergh’s work to be very hit-and-miss. When he’s good (from my point of view) he’s very good; when he’s off (again from my point of […]
I’ve been hung up for a few weeks in my plan to re-watch all of Stanley Kubrick’s films in chronological order because the prospect of sitting through Spartacus one more time was a bit daunting. There was a three year gap between the success of Paths of Glory and this, the biggest production of Kubrick’s […]
TCM once again offers a very elegant video tribute to those movie people who died during the year — actors, writers, directors, producers. Seeing so many familiar (and a few unfamiliar) faces in this brief assembly causes a sense of shock — news of many of these deaths somehow passed me by during the year. […]
The latest pair of releases from the BFI’s Flipside series offer a fascinating snapshot of what was happening to the male sense of identity at the height of the feminist impact on filmmaking in the ’70s and early ’80s. While people like Sally Potter, Lizzie Borden and Marleen Gorris were dissecting and reformulating the ways […]
Jalmari Helander’s Rare Exports (2010) began as a couple of shorts (2003 and 2005) which were a success on the Internet. In the form of industrial training films, they depicted the hunting, taming, and training of wild Santa Clauses in Northern Finland. These are strong, rather vicious creatures which end up being marketed around the […]
You could make an interesting double bill out of Daniel Barber’s Harry Brown (2009) and Joe Cornish’s Attack the Block (2011). Both are set in crime-ridden British housing estates where residents are terrorized by youth gangs, both have a gritty tone which strives to create a sense of relevance and immediacy. But while they have […]