Normally when a film’s auteur identity is ascribed to a producer it’s because said producer is a major Hollywood player. We know what a Jerry Bruckheimer film looks like, as surely as previous generations knew what a David O Selznick film looks like. In the independent realm, the director is […]
World War II
One, Two, Three (1961): Billy Wilder’s Satirical Greatest Hits
The Prisoner (1955) Alec Guinness’s War of the Words (Review)
For my money, Alec Guinness is one of the greatest British character actors of all time. No matter if he was playing the buck-toothed Professor Marcus in The Ladykillers, or the wise and mysterious Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars, Guinness always brought elegance, wit, and charm to his performances. Rewind […]
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 […]