Category: Films
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Great Sadness
This week, the Paweł Pawlikowski film, Cold War, was released on home video. I missed this in the cinema, even though I found the film’s trailer utterly entrancing. So I thought I would treat myself to a Blu Ray copy of the film. Earlier in the week I actually saw an advertisement for the film in…
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The Dark Ages of Film History?
I was recently talking to a some colleagues at work about one of my favourite films of all time, the classic Howard Hawks screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby. Made in 1938, it stars two of Hollywood’s biggest ever stars, Kathryn Hepburn and Cary Grant, both giving terrific performances in a classic of the genre. How…
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The Death of MoviePass?
A few months ago, I tried to work out what the business model of MoviePass (and putative UK equivalent cPass) might be. I concluded that the operators were going to need very deep pockets, and there was absolutely no certainty that the model works. And that seems to have been an accurate prediction. The service…
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Netflix, Independent Cinema, and Hollywood’s New Business Model
The other day The Ringer published a piece about Netflix and their original movie strategy. The piece, entitled Netflix and Shrill listed the original movies that Netflix has already released in 2018 and challenged readers to see how many they recognised. For most people, the most familiar title will have been The Cloverfield Paradox. This…
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Blade Runner 2049
Note: There will be spoiler elements to this. So if you’ve not yet seen Blade Runner 2049, and you plan on doing so, you may want to skip this piece. I’ve been meaning to write about this for weeks now, having been both dreading and eagerly anticipating this film since I heard it was being…
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London Film Festival 2017
I went to a decent selection of films at this year’s London Film Festival, and overall was very impressed by the range and quality. There are obviously a stupidly large number of films that you can see, and while seeing some big hitters early is always nice, there’s also the opportunity to see films that…
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Thor: Ragnarok
I confess that I feel left behind by Marvel’s Cinematic Universe these days. The films come thick and fast, and I’ve not seen them all by any means. That has begun to instill in me a fear that I won’t actually fully understand a new film because I’ve missed things that happened in the last…
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Dwindling Choices
A couple of weeks ago, Ofcom released its annual Communications Market Report. It’s always stuffed full of information about the UK media marketplace that can be fascinating to dissect. In 2016, ownership of DVD players (including Blu Ray and games consoles with DVD functionality) was 67% of UK households. This year, it’s just 63% of…
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Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan is clearly one of this generation’s outstanding film makers. From Memento through to his Dark Knight trilogy, to Inception and Interstellar, he does something interesting every time. Not only are his films glorious to watch, shot with large-format film including IMAX for much of his latest, but his films are very successful at…
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The Lost City of Z
I first heard about Percy Fawcett back in the late eighties when a friend told me about him. We’d both read Redmond O’Hanlon’s Into the Heart of Borneo detailing his trip with James Fenton, and I think that In Trouble Again, in which O’Hanlon heads into Amazonia, had just come out. Indeed extracts may have…
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Future Shock: The Story of 2000AD
The comic, 2000AD, was launched in 1977 when I was 7 years old. While I read a fair few comics when I was young, I can’t say that I was reading 2000AD from the very start. It was more about The Beano at that time, which I’d begin to buy with my pocket money on…
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High Rise
I didn’t think about it until during the film, but could there be any more appropriate location to watch High Rise than the Curzon Bloomsbury (née Renoir cinema) in the Brunswick Centre? In Ben Wheatley’s superb adaptation of JG Ballard’s novel, his production designer Mark Tildesley has created a modernist* marvel of building. The way…
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Hail Caesar!
A new Coen brothers film is always a cause for celebration. That’s particularly the case when they adopt more of a screwball tone to their films. Hail Caesar! is actually more of a group of sketches than a fully fledged film – the plot is slight. We follow the action from the perspective of Eddie…