Everyday magic: Goro Miyazaki’s From Up On Poppy Hill
Japan’s legendary Studio Ghibli is, of course, best known for the epic animated fantasies of Hayao Miyazaki. Although most of these films focus on young characters with appeal to children, the films...
View ArticleLate Summer Viewing, part 1
Falling behind again! Things have been hectic lately – working on a documentary which has turned out to be bigger than expected and is now way overdue, plus starting a new project with a tight...
View ArticleLate Summer Viewing, part 2
I’ve mentioned the boutique label Twilight Time before; they continue to release an interestingly eclectic series of limited edition Blu-rays (3000 copies of each title), with their specialty being a...
View ArticleThe Fabulous World of Karel Zeman
One of the best things about Glenn Erickson’s DVD Savant column over at DVD Talk is his habit of posting, along with his knowledgeable reviews, interesting and useful links. A little while back, he...
View ArticleDamned Treason
My friend Howard and I get together fairly regularly for an evening of conversation and movie viewing. The conversation often revolves around what he goes through teaching film courses to first year...
View ArticleDeath Hunt (1981): entertainment vs.history
I didn’t see Death Hunt when it was released in 1981, but I seem to recall that it wasn’t well reviewed – at least not here in Canada. It was one of those tax shelter movies which offended our sense …...
View ArticleHaunting Television: The Secret of Crickley Hall (2012)
The career of British horror writer James Herbert, who died earlier this year, somewhat parallels that of Stephen King. Both published their first novels in 1974 – Herbert’s The Rats, King’s Carrie....
View ArticleOctober 30, 1938: When Welles Unleashed Wells
Although radio broadcasting arrived more than two decades after the birth of cinema – and movies were the dominant form of entertainment in North America for the first half of the century – radio was...
View ArticleRossellini & Bergman: a collision of life and art
When approaching 3 Films by Roberto Rossellini Starring Ingrid Bergman, Criterion’s new 5-disk DVD edition of the first three collaborations between the Italian filmmaker and the Hollywood star, it’s...
View ArticleArt of the Comic Strip: Dear Mr. Watterson
At some time in the process of our transformation into “consumers” – that is, after the fundamental shift in our relationship with the world around us where exchange value superseded all other...
View ArticleGenre Viewing: Science Fiction
Much of what I’ve seen in a theatre this year qualifies as genre movies. One day I’ll have to sit down and evaluate my viewing in some systematic way to figure out why I spend less and less time on …...
View ArticleThe 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...
View ArticleHaunting Classic: The Uninvited (1944)
The Uninvited (1944) was one of the first American movies to treat the ghost story seriously. Until then, ghosts were either played for comedy, or were deceptions cooked up as part of some criminal...
View ArticleGenre Viewing 2
Genre, of course, is not limited to the fantastic — science fiction, fantasy, horror. Contemporary and historical dramas can also fall within genre boundaries. Prisoners (Denis Villeneuve) Denis...
View ArticleCombat! Television’s Last “Good” War
Combat! was one of the most popular and well-received series of the early to mid ’60s. Lasting for five seasons, it ran two-and-a-half times longer than the historical period it covered, following the...
View ArticleGenre On Disk, part one
My genre viewing on disk over the past couple of months ranges from classics to crap, and I have to admit that I’ve enjoyed it all. From England, I’ve obtained impressive Blu-rays of three key movies...
View ArticleGenre On Disk, part two
The concept of genre is endlessly malleable, permitting filmmakers to borrow, invent, mix and match narrative elements to create a seemingly inexhaustible array of stories which combine familiar...
View ArticleThe Pathology of Power: Elio Petri’s Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion
Elio Petri's 1970 masterpiece Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion provides one of the most incisive dissections of the pathology of power ever committed to film.
View ArticleThe Lure of Paradise
If I had watched Ulrich Seidl’s Paradise trilogy a few weeks earlier, these three films would have made it into my year-end post as one of 2013′s highlights. I first encountered Seidl’s work (the...
View ArticleGhosts of Television Past, part one
The English love ghost stories. There are the classics, of course – Hamlet and Macbeth, for instance – but after the advent of Gothic literature in the late 1700s, spirits, whether harmful or helpful,...
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