I’ve been falling behind on my notes about what I’ve been watching, so I won’t be going into a lot of detail here, just making a few observations about some of the movies I saw in the past month. The Oxford Murders (Álex De La Iglesia, 2008) Spanish director Álex De La Iglesia has a […]
I went to see the new Studio Ghibli release a couple of weeks ago. The Secret World of Arrietty (2010) is based on the Borrowers books by Mary Norton, mostly written in the ’50s. These stories of little people who live in the walls and under the floorboards of houses, “borrowing” unwanted scraps from the […]
When you buy more DVDs than you’ll ever have time to watch (one of the hazards of addiction), you end up with large backlogs piled on various shelves, the sight of which tends to nag at you. Sometimes, you can’t help asking yourself why the hell you bought them in the first place, but of […]
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 […]
In the short history of DVD, many companies have come and gone. The major distributors are still around, of course, and public domain companies like Mill Creek seem to be surviving despite the generally poor quality of their output. But for collectors, it’s the smaller “boutique” companies that have offered some of the most exciting […]
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 […]
The series of ten Martin Beck novels written by Swedish husband and wife Per Wahlöö and Maj Sjöwall between 1965 and 1975 are not entirely conventional mysteries. They are police procedurals which focus on the tedious sifting of facts and clues which may or may not lead anywhere, in which accident and coincidence often abruptly […]