Film

In the Sky Arts director series I watched a tribute to Stephen Frears the other day whose canon of work includes My Beautiful Laundrette, Liaisons Dangereuses and The Queen.   The first film he directed was Gumshoe. This was way back in 1971. I enjoyed it at the time and I enjoyed it when I [...]

This adaptation of John Preston’s novel based on Sutton Hoo has rightly received critical acclaim. It stars Ranulf Fiennes as Basil Brown the excavator commissioned by widow Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) to investigate mounds on her land. He unearths a ship used to bury a Saxon King. The theme is [...]

After early Truffaut I have moved onto another French director Francois Ozon who typifies why I like French films so much. I downloaded from Amazon Prime two of his films, Swimming Pool (2003) and 8 Femmes (2002). The story of the Swimming Pool is of successful crime writer Sarah Morton. It begins [...]

After rather binging on Hollywood, it’s time for a change and what better to revisit than the French New Wave cinema of the late 1950s? Quartre Cents Coups  (400 Blows) was Franois Truffaut’s directorial debut aged 27 and is rightly revered as a classic. The story is of 14 year old Antone [...]