Blog posts by year and monthAugust 2010
Posts (9)
The silent leitmotif
At a time of year when many a self-respecting film critic is sipping prosecco after a hard day's swanning from glamorous screening room to glamorous screening room at the glamorous film festival held in the deliciously chilly atmosphere of glamorous post-holiday season Venice, I shall be in Shetland, as always, co-curating the annual Screenplay Festival. And this year the Dodge Brothers are coming with me and we shall be lending our strings and a washboard to a silent movie, the 1921 William S Hart Western, White Oak.
The Copy Confidential Cannes Conundrum
When is a review not a review? Does a festival atmosphere in which the star of the movie to be reviewed, in this case Juliette Binoche, is predestined to win the Best Actress Award really have a dramatic effect on a critic's faculties? Of course there is only one way to find out.
Exorcism Schism
It's Come To Work with Mark Day as you and I take in a screening of a new film with the word "Exorcism" in the title. That's right, it's the new Eli "Hostel" Roth-produced movie about an Exorcist working in the American South. What could go wrong?
Feeling Good in Dagenham
In a Ford car factory in Dagenham a group of women led by Sally Hawkins from Happy-Go-Lucky, ex-Bond girl Rosamund Pike and Blackadder's "Queenie" Miranda Richardson, teamed up to win the right to equal pay for women in Stephen "Crying Game" Woolley and Nigel "Calendar Girls" Cole's joyful and uplifting retelling of that groundbreaking strike of 1968.
Creature Feature
One of cinema's animation giants gets a lovely exhibition at the London Museum of Film on the South Bank and I come face to face with some of the monsters of my childhood.
The Year in Review
Seen anything good this year? I have, really, but lawks a mercy have I seen some rubbish too, dire, dire rubbish... See what I did there? Anyway, here are my top five worst and best films of 2010 so far.
Lost and Found Department
Somewhere, in the world's attics and sheds probably, are prints of some of the greatest films ever made and lost. So I asked you what films you would rather see in their place and a floodgate was opened, and you became more forthright than you have ever been on any subject since the beginning of...
A Team Tribute
Yes it's that time of year again: woods, tents. stringed instruments, a washboard and a major Hollywood theme tune. And this year's skiffled blockbuster? The A Team...
Inception reception perception
Christopher Nolan's brilliant Inception is only the latest celluloid reverie on dreamscapes and in your replies to my blog on this matter you have excavated cinema's id and uncovered a vast seam of raw oneirism featuring fantasies as diverse as a videogame movies starring Edward Furlong, a Japan...
