Film

Last night the excellent SKY ARTS cinema programme featured one of my favourite directors Fred Zinnemann. It’s a name that the more casual cinema-goer probably knows but perhaps cannot list his films which include From Here to Eternity, High Noon, A Man for all Seasons,  Oklahoma!, The Nun’s [...]

We critics are no different from the general audience in our likes and dislikes – worse if anything. I never really liked two of the most talented female Hollywood stars Meryl Streep and Katherine Hepburn, the first for being so pleased with herself and the second lacking the warmth and [...]

I watched the final 4 episodes of Das Boot. One critic observed that a few years ago you would call it unmissable but such is the improvement in European productions that he down graded this to hugely enjoyable. I would not have gone as far at that. There were 2 parallel stories, one on the U-boat [...]

I was curious as to why Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct (1992) did not make the list of 10 great sex movies I cited recently and watched it again in case I missed something. The scene where Sharon Stone as writer Katherine Tremell, whilst interrogated at the San Francisco Police Dept, crosses and [...]