By the late 1940s, it seemed that Charles Laughton, that great Scarborough-born star of the silver screen, was losing interest in acting. Believing his performances in films like The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Rembrandt (1936) and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939) were […]
film noir
Tales from the Urban Jungle: Brute Force (1947) and The Naked City (1948) (Review)
Film noir’s spiritual home has always been the streets. With The Naked City, though, Jules Dassin made that spiritual home into a literal home. Previous films had cooked up bustling metropolitan locations on Hollywood sound-stages, but Dassin’s film was the first film to take advantage of the new lightweight cameras […]
The Frightened City (1961) Connery on the Cusp (Review)
Released to StudioCanal’s Vintage Classics Collection this week, The Frightened City is a 1961 British noir from Canadian-born director John Lemont about protection rackets in London’s West End. It’s a solid, if fairly unremarkable gangland thriller, one which would perhaps be lost to the mists of time were it not […]
Story of a Love Affair (1950): lies, PIs and neorealism from Antonioni (Review)
Michelangelo Antonioni’s first feature film begins with a set of photographs being displayed for the camera and a warning that this won’t be the same old story. Already, he’s making promises: promises of narrative innovation, clearly, and promises that the camera – and therefore the viewer – will be active […]
Wasp Network – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 260
Fans of podcasts where two people can’t agree on a single film, your ship has come in, because this week Graham and Tim are reviewing Olivier Assayas’s divisive Netflix original Wasp Network! Which reviewer compared it to “a Communist version of The A-Team”? And, more importantly, did they mean it […]
Battlefield Earth – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 256
This week’s Cinema Eclectica is devoted entirely to Badaptations – those times when, in between the page and the screen, something vital goes missing. Graham’s choice is 1995’s The Scarlet Letter, in which one of the most introverted and spiritual of 19th-century novels is turned into a Demi Moore bonkbuster. […]
Nightfall (1956): An Unsung Noir by one of the Great Unsung Directors (Review)
Jacques Tourneur is the kind of director that has been consigned to the history books, the RKO-man was well known for his many low-budget horror films (including the pre-Romero, I walked with a Zombie), he also did many noirs, westerns and epics. Filmmakers just aren’t allowed that level of liberation, […]