Jan Werich stands upon Ken Adam’s impressive space-age set, a fluffy white Persian cat with piercing blue eyes cradled in his arms. His co-star Sean Connery has stalked, somewhat like a bored panther, off the Pinewood sound stage as soon as the director called cut and now, the figures who […]
History
Desire (1958)/All My Good Countrymen (1968); Two Films by Vojtěch Jasný (Review)
Onoda: 10,000 Nights in the Jungle (2021) (Cinema Review)
One Night in Miami (2021) A Conversation with History (Review)
Originally released on Amazon Prime Video and cinemas back in January 2021, Regina King’s feature-length debut One Night in Miami, an adaptation of Kemp Powers’ 2013 play of the same name, who also wrote the screenplay, closed out the year with a Criterion Collection DVD and Blu-ray release in December. […]
Kagemusha (1980) Kurosawa, the master visual story-teller (Blu-ray Review)
74 years old Akira Kurosawa was when he directed Kagemusha. And, funnily enough, the 1970s weren’t a kind decade to the master director with the highest-profile film, of the three he produced that decade, being the marginal Serbian Adventure Movie, Dersu Uzala. A point stressed in the extras of this […]
Eva (1962): All About Eva (Review)
In 1945, the proclaimed king of thriller writers in Europe, James Hadley Chase penned his novel, Eve. Set in the seamy side of the Hollywood film industry, this psychological thriller told the story of Clive Thurston, a shipping clerk who stumbles upon a talented but TB-stricken writer who subsequently dies […]
1917 – Cinema Eclectica Podcast 258
One, Two, Three (1961): Billy Wilder’s Satirical Greatest Hits
Sink the Bismarck! (1960) A British Stiff-Upper Lip Vision of Heroism (Review)
Directed by Lewis Gilbert, the 1960 film Sink the Bismarck! tells the true-life story of the Royal Navy’s mission to track down and destroy the eponymous pride of the German fleet and scourge of Atlantic shipping. Making it’s UK Blu-ray debut on the Eureka Classics label, it’s a distinctive film […]
Shoah The Four Sisters (2018) Chamber Pieces From A Historical Nightmare (Review)
Even before his death in July 2018, Claude Lanzmann was always easier to imagine in retrospect. He remained a public figure into his nineties, and a valuable one at that: thoughtful, eloquent, combative when necessary. His work, though, was dominated by two time periods. The first was the period from […]