An opportunity to meet my favourite film critic, Jonathan Rosenbaum, turned out to be a rich evening of films from around the world.
An evening with Jonathan Rosenbaum
Tag: Film History
Late summer viewing 2014, part two
A selection of recently viewed films ranges from revisionist horror to horror-comedy to experimental to Hitchcock imitation (or homage), all impressively presented on Blu-ray.
Video Nasties Revisted
Video Nasties: Draconian Days, Jake West’s second documentary about Britain’s panic over the evils of home video is a fascinating examination of the political intentions of censorship and the resulting chaotic social impact of the state’s attempts to control personal taste.
Documentary and the evolution of movies
The documentary impulse was integral to the evolution of film and a key element was the application of the new technology to the 19th Century impulse to explore and “conquer” far-off exotic places and cultures.
Reading Movie History
Reading great critics of the past – Agee, Farber, Kauffmann – sheds interesting light on the ways our perception of film history has been formed.
The One, True Doctor and the Passage of Time
Fifty years ago today (the day after JFK was assassinated), as a nine-year-old boy living in a small village in southeast England, I sat down after what we then called “tea” (our evening meal) and started watching a TV show I knew nothing about. It had several characters in a blue police phone box who […]
DVD Review: Masaki Kobayashi Against the System (Eclipse)
Criterion’s Eclipse line has three general streams: to explore fringe genres, to introduce work by lesser known filmmakers, to present lesser known works by more familiar directors. The latest release, Masaki Kobayashi Against the System, falls into the third category, presenting three early works by the director of the three-part epic The Human Condition (1959-61, […]
DVD Review: Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967)
Jean-Luc Godard wasn’t the first of the Cahiers du Cinema critics to start making movies, but his debut feature, A bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), was the one which most clearly announced the arrival of the nouvelle vague. Where Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Louis Malle and others were stretching the possibilities of conventional narrative form, […]
Disk of the Week: My Son John (1952) – Bad craziness in Hollywood
In the past couple of years Olive Films has released an eclectic variety of movies on DVD and Blu-ray, from noir to comedies, exploitation to obscure indie dramas – recent releases include Bresson’s The Devil, Probably alongside Aldrich’s Twilight’s Last Gleaming! But for me, one of their most interesting releases is a fine Blu-ray edition […]
Too big to read …
Like most people who grew up with them, books mean more to me than simply the words they contain. I bought a Kindle last year, and I have dozens of books on it, but mostly it sits untouched on a shelf. I’ve only really used it on my trips to Beijing last year and England […]
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