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Articles by Neil Rosen

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About Neil Rosen

Neil went to the City of London School and Manchester University graduating with a 1st in economics. After a brief stint in accountancy, Neil emigrated to a kibbutz In Israel. His articles on the burgeoning Israeli film industry earned comparisons to Truffaut and Godard in Cahiers du Cinema. Now one of the world's leading film critics and moderators at film Festivals Neil has written definitively in his book Kosher Nostra on Jewish post war actors. Neil lives with his family in North London. More Posts

Rebecca/Netflix

If you have not seen the Alfred Hitchcock 1940 version with Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine, nor read Daphne du Maurier’s novel, you might enjoy this recent adaptation which director Ben Wheatley is anxious to point out is not a remake. The plot of two Mrs de Winters – one dying in a [...]

October 23, 2020 // 0 Comments

World War II and cinema

I very much enjoyed this Sky Arts 3 part series on cinema and World War Two. They assembled most of their usual film historians – Ian Nathan, Bonnie Greer, Derek Malcolm, but right wing columnist Simon Heffer also contributed. War films are a genre I like and believe underrated. At their best [...]

October 10, 2020 // 0 Comments

North by Northwest 1959

The other day a good friend told me he knew someone living on his own who derived much pleasure from Cary Grant films. For me the king of Romantic Comedy was at his peak with Alfred Hitchcock directing him in films like To Catch a Thief and North By Northwest.   Yesterday in that fallow period of [...]

September 28, 2020 // 0 Comments

I stand corrected

I am grateful to a reader and friend for pointing out an error. In a recent piece I said that Winston Churchill was not a movie buff. In fact he loved the cinema and converted the dining room at Chartwell to a private cinema. His favourite film was Lady Hamilton starring Laurence Olivier and [...]

August 27, 2020 // 0 Comments

Mervyn LeRoy, Sean Connery and Nazi Titanic

Over the weekend I caught up with The Directors series on Mervyn Le Roy, watched a tribute to Sean Connery on his 85th birthday and a documentary on a Goebbels-backed film on the Titanic. I suspect  that Mervyn LeRoy is a name with which you are unfamiliar. He made Little Caesar and Fugitive from [...]

August 23, 2020 // 0 Comments

Christopher Lee and cricket loving film stars

In May 1959 C.P. Snow delivered a lecture at Cambridge entitled The Two Cultures which subsequently became a book. It was about the ignorance of academics in the humanities on science and science on the arts. No such cultural separation exists at the Rust. We on the arts side pride ourselves on our [...]

August 11, 2020 // 0 Comments

Our Man in Havana/1959

The Carol Reed/Graham Greene partnership is one of the most successful in cinema and here they combined on the latter’s novel. I had read the novel some time ago but never seen the film until I downloaded it last week. Carol Reed is one of the quartet of great English film directors alongside [...]

August 2, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Plot Against America (in a film context)

The editor also asked me to post a review of The Plot Against America putting it in a film context. The two memorable films on this subject of creeping fascism are It Happened Here (1966) and Vittorio de Sica’s last film The Garden of the Finzi- Continis (1970).  It Happened Here was a black and [...]

July 25, 2020 // 0 Comments

The Directors/Sky Arts

I was so pleased that a further series of The Directors was being run by SKY. I happened to see listed under SKY Documentaries a documentary on Don Siegel, most famous for the Dirty Harry films with Clint Eastwood. In pushing the “Record all” button I saw there were further programmes on John [...]

July 4, 2020 // 0 Comments

Kind Hearts and Coronets

This classic – which I watched on the Talking Pictures channel yesterday – passed with flying colours the Rosen test of excellence, namely initially deciding to watch the first few minutes of a film I have seen many times and staying with it right to its end. It’s known for the [...]

June 26, 2020 // 0 Comments

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