Category: Films

Well I wasn’t nearly as quick off the mark seeing this as I was The Fellowship of the Ring last year which I saw at about 11.00am on the opening day. And this, after I waited a year to see it! Was the wait worth it? It most certainly was. This is epic cinema at…

The Quiet American seems to have gone through something of a long gestation between being made and arriving on our screens. According to this article from the Washington Post, the film has been ready to screen for over a year, having previewed on Sept 10 2001. But things are not that easy for a film…

Thanks to Geoff, I now have a copy of the Extended Version of Fellowship of the Rings. Of course the first thing I had to do was look for my name on the fanclub. Yes – I spent good money on joining the official fan club as a charter member, and my year’s subscription bought…

Oh dear. I really wanted to enjoy this. I really love Bond films. I’m a fan. But there are some major problems with this film. First of all, let me say that director Lee Tamahori has done a couple of interesting things here. Bond is captured and tortured through an opening credit sequence that does…

This was the closing film at the London Film Festival, and I must admit that I’m at little disappointed with it. Based on a novel by Rosamond Lehmann, The Echoing Grove, the film tells the story of Rickie Masters (Paul Bettany), his wife Madelaine (Olivia Williams), and in particular her sister Dinah (Helena Bonham Carter).…

Every year the London Film Festival has a surprise film, and this was the second time I’ve been to it. It always sells out, and the simple thing is that you don’t know what you’re going to see. It will be a different film to the rest of the festival, a preview of something forthcoming.…

There’s nothing like a successful promotion is there? Last Thursday’s Evening Standard had a free cinema token in it that gave readers a free ticket to any screening this evening at any Odeon cinema. I dutifully felt I had to take up the offer. I perused their website and chose Talk to Her, the most…

Finally I got to see this at the London Film Festival screening this evening, and it’s fantastic. Of course I managed to show up without my tickets. I was convinced that I had left them at work, but of course I brought them back with me on Friday night, and had left them in my…

After enjoying Arsenal’s imperious 1-0 defeat of Newcastle yesterday afternoon, I headed into London with vague notions of watching one of the films in this years London Film Festival. Working on the basis that screenings are never full and you can always get in line for a return, I consulted by Guardian Guide to see…

Well I saw this last night, and I must admit that I went in knowing that it was not going to be exactly brilliant. Well I wasn’t short changed. So it was never going to be Oscar material, but I thought that it’d at least be an entertaining way of spending a couple of hours.…

Finally got around to watching the first of my Godfather DVDs. Got the trilogy a while back and hadn’t sat down and watched them. The combination of a twisted ankle and bad back afforded me the chance to watch the first film. It’ll be interesting to compare this masterpiece with the forthcoming Road to Perdition.

So here’s another one that I haven’t seen. Some years ago, the film critic David Thomson wrote a piece in The Independent on Sunday Review section explaining why he loved this film so much. I tore out the article, but never read it, because the first line warned that I should watch the film first…