I don’t spend a lot of time these days wondering why my personal taste in movies is so often completely out of sync with popular and critical opinion, but every now and then something comes up that makes me pause for a moment. On Friday, I went to see J.J. Abrams’ Super 8, even though […]
British television in the ’60s and ’70s was limited by a lack of money, a fact which resulted in certain distinctive characteristics. Most shows were shot in studio, on videotape, with quite obviously flimsy sets. These limitations forced creators to follow a theatrical, rather than cinematic, model; at their worst, these shows seemed like creaky […]
British TV has always been primarily a writer’s medium; since the ’50s, the biggest stars have tended to be the writers, with writers’ names attached possessively to projects. Television production was often built around writers such as Alan Bennett, Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter, who was one of the biggest, with each of his new […]
Better known for his work with George Lucas, Willard Huyck directed a small independent horror movie in 1973 which shows more promise than his career ever fulfilled.
Peter Yates died in London on January 9, aged 81. His two best-known films were Bullitt (1968) and Breaking Away (1979), and that perhaps indicates why he was not as widely known as many of his contemporaries. He directed a wide range of movies in many different genres, and for that reason never established a […]
Although Britain’s Hammer Films was first formed in the 1930s, initially in an attempt to expand a theatre chain into areas of production and distribution, only five films were made before the war – comedies and mysteries. Production resumed after the war with more comedies, mysteries and thrillers. It was 1953 before the company took […]
It was unfortunate that until the very end of his career, the Japanese director Kinji Fukasaku was known in North America mostly for his worst film: The Green Slime. This was an “international” production, shot in Japanese studios with an American and European cast, a very bad script and even worse special effects. But even […]
I was recently rooting through a stack of boxes in my mother’s basement and came across my old collection of Cinefantastique magazines. I can’t recall exactly how I first heard about it – I think it might have been a brief announcement by Baird Searles in his occasional movie column in The Magazine of Fantasy […]