Film
emma.simmonds
If in space no one can hear you scream, that’s certainly not a problem you’ll experience in a giallo sound studio. Known for their high anxiety and buckets of blood, the Italian giallos of the Sixties and Seventies gave us heinous horror, drenched in style. Directors such as Lucio Fulci, Mario Bava and Dario Argento enjoyed a reign of terror with their handsome barbarism benefitting from fantastically histrionic sounds and scores. In Berberian Sound Studio writer-director Peter Strickland takes this phenomenon as a mere starting point, following his self-financed debut Katalin Varga with Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Aside from the platinum hair and the porcelain beauty, there is no identikit Hitchcock blonde. She can be an ice-hearted femme fatale or a traumatised hysteric, or she can be Grace Kelly, a peachy embodiment of femininity whom the director enjoyed throwing in harm’s way. He would memorably do it in Rear Window, a film which he talked about to his leading lady throughout the making of Dial M for Murder.Hitchcock first saw Kelly in the same 1950 screen test which persuaded Fred Zinnemann to cast her in High Noon (1952). Whatever he saw, he deemed her ideal for Dial M for Murder (1954), a film Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Like his great contemporary Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant not only gave some of his best performances for Hitchcock, he also grabbed the opportunity to darken his screen persona. It was never the case, with either of them, of simply playing “baddies”. Far more significantly, they revealed the dark psyches of average, even good men, in performances that leave the audience with the bitter aftertaste of familiarity.In Grant’s case, there is no better example of this than in Notorious. Released a year after World War II, on the surface the film is a spy yarn about Nazis conspiring against the US, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
There’s an affecting moment in the café scene in Torn Curtain (1966) when the physicist Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his fiancée-assistant Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews), desperate to flee East Berlin, are awed into compassion for the jittery Polish Countess Kuchinska, who offers to help them if they will sponsor her bid to emigrate to the U.S. It looks a little as if Newman and Andrews themselves were awed by Lila Kedrova’s fabulously flowing performance.Hitchcock must have calculated that Kedrova's exotic bird of prey would radiate some flamboyant humanity in a grey Cold War suspenser Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Recent Iranian cinema has seen the best of times - and the worst of times. From the 1990s onwards the phenomenon of the "Iranian New Wave" has captured worldwide festival attention, with directors like Abbas Kiarostami, and father and daughter pair Mohsen and Samara Makhmalbaf among the leaders of the list of those who brought a new view of their nation to international eyes.The worst of times came with the declaration at the end of last year that the country’s professional film body, Tehran’s House of Cinema, was illegal; director Jafar Panahi, banned by the authorities from making films, Read more ...
emma.simmonds
For all that’s been said about Orson Welles – usually focusing on his towering genius and sizable ego - he was above all a great contrarian. In interviews he was often genial and self-effacing and of course a scintillating raconteur. During his later years he could be avuncular, entertainingly unpredictable and very funny, like a mischievous lecturer. His The Lady From Shanghai (1947) is so loaded with eccentricity it’s positively cock-eyed and Welles was of course an outcast in Hollywood, that is until he cast himself out. So while those familiar with the legend alone might find F for Fake ( Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
The relationship between Hitchcock and Hedren was already subject to scrutiny, and is symbolic of his fascination with blondes. Soon, with Sienna Miller playing the leading lady of 1963’s terrifying The Birds and Toby Jones as the director, it’s going to be revisited with the TV film The Girl (2010’s Hitchcock’s Women had trodden this path). Hedren has advised Miller, and also told press that Hitchcock “was an extremely sad character…deviant almost to the point of dangerous”. (See the clip below for more of her views on Hitchcock.)After seeing Hedren in a drinks’ ad on TV, Hitchcock put her Read more ...
Karen Krizanovich
There are two kinds of people in this world: those who think The Three Stooges are funny and those who just don’t get it. People in the first category are much better people. In real life, The Three Stooges were three vaudevillians - Moe Howard, Curly Howard, Larry Fine and latterly Shemp Howard, Joe Besser and Curly Joe DeRita - famous for what is now called "extreme slapstick". Their career ran from approximately 1930 to, in various incarnations, the 1970s and their short films have not been off American TV since they first were broadcast in 1958. So, for the generations who grew Read more ...
josh.spero
Hitchcock was fond of the locked-box mystery, but never in the obvious form: whether it’s the leads in Rope, stuck in their apartment with a body shut up in a trunk, or the survivors from a ship murderously bobbing along together in Lifeboat, the trap was all. James Stewart as LB Jefferies in Rear Window is another man locked in a box, this time kept in his apartment by his broken leg. But clever old Hitchcock – he sets the mystery outside the box.There is another box too: the one Stewart’s window faces onto, the one whose bottom is a communal courtyard in New York, whose sides are other Read more ...
Matt Wolf
There's not exactly an excess of colour in Shadow Dancer, the IRA-themed thriller that unfolds amid a bleached-out landscape of browns and greys, windswept waterfronts and drab, unwelcoming enclosures. But amid the drear, the director James Marsh (Man on Wire) has fashioned the most psychologically intricate and exciting film of the year so far and the first in a long time to restore the violent bequest of the Troubles to the cinematic primacy we associate with the likes of Cal or The Crying Game. Made all the more urgent by its gift for understatement, the movie is almost unbearably tense. Read more ...
fisun.guner
Some actors build their characters from the feet up. In fact, it’s a theatrical commonplace to think that shoes can hold the key to a character's psychology. Hitchcock takes the idea and applies it to the opening sequence of Strangers on a Train, his 1951 adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 debut novel. In a brilliant opening sequence two pairs of shoes hurry through a station concourse, onto a platform, and finally converge when one accidently knocks the other as their owners sit opposite each other: the stylish but conventional black shoe greeting the camp black and white brogue in an Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Bavo Defurne’s North Sea Texas is a more than distinguished addition to the coming-of-age film genre, catching the painful moments of approaching maturity. Set in a Sixties provincial seaside town in Belgium, the poignancy of 16-year-old hero Pim discovering his gay sexuality rings very true, and movingly.In a location of low-rise flats and a long, lonely beach, there’s little in the place to excite a teenager except for the local bar (its neon sign explains the last word of the film’s title). The excitement for Pim (Jelle Florizoone) comes more with the son of his neighbours, Gino (Mathias Read more ...