To mark the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, just as James Cameron releases a 3D version of his 1997 moneymaking behemoth, Criterion has brought out a new edition of Roy Ward Baker’s A Night to Remember (1958), still the best version of the story. The two-disk DVD (also available on Blu-ray) offers a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Although I no doubt had read about Ken Russell‘s film of D.H. Lawrence’s Women In Love (1969) when it was released, I didn’t see it until some years later. My first real memory of him is from late 1970 or early ’71. I was living in Newfoundland then and my mother still subscribed to a […]
Time was – longer ago than I care to contemplate – I would have devoured a movie like Zoltan Korda’s The Four Feathers (1939) as nothing more than a thrilling adventure that appealed to a boy’s imagination. Watching it now in Criterion’s lush new edition, I found various parts of myself in conflict for the […]
Dark Of The Sun (Jack Cardiff, 1968) The great cinematographer Jack Cardiff, responsible for the dazzling imagery of Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death (1946), Black Narcissus (1947) and The Red Shoes (1948), and Albert Lewin’s Pandora and the Flying Dutchman (1951), among many others, was also a director. One of my earliest […]
There’s still no recognizable pattern to my DVD watching, but maybe I shouldn’t worry about it. If my viewing became more systematic, it would probably start to feel like work. I finally finished getting through the British TV series Department S, which I mentioned a while back. It never really improved, though perhaps the production […]
Guest blogger Howard Curle follows up his previous account of William K. Everson’s class on British Cinema at New York University with an in-depth look at one of the movies Everson introduced him to: John Baxter’s Love on the Dole (1941). John Baxter & Love on the Dole (1941) By Howard Curle One of the […]
If I’m in a room talking to someone and there happens to be a bookcase nearby, or a shelf of DVDs, I become easily distracted from the conversation as I try to read titles to get some idea of the other person’s tastes and interests. A similar thing happens when I watch a movie: if […]
Rapidly developing video technologies are altering not just our expectations but also our responses to the experience of watching movies. Blu-ray, hi-def TVs, the digital technologies which are used more and more in production – all have helped to create particular standards which many viewers now apply to virtually everything they watch. A lot of […]