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Film

Brief Encounter

In their Classic Movies series the Sky Arts film critics (Ian Nathan, Mel Norman and Steven Armstrong) reviewed Brief  Encounter, a Noel Coward and David Lean joint production. It raises the question as to whether or not a film made in 1945 is dated , a period piece or a timeless classic. Clearly [...]

August 11, 2024 // 0 Comments

Film Noir

Tim Young, an old friend of mine, has written a comprehensive – though mercifully brief – study of film noir entitled A Black Pool Opened up at My Feet and I Dived In: Film Noir: The cinematic language of 1940s America. Probably the modern meaning is ‘dark’. It’s perhaps easier to [...]

May 31, 2024 // 0 Comments

Titanic lives/Richard Davenport-Hines

The Titanic sank 112 years and 1 month ago but it’s still an iconic event and I have often wondered why. It must be the sheer tragedy of the greatest liner of its age sinking on its maiden voyage and/or the film which launched the career of Kate Winslet and/or the horror of rich and poor [...]

May 11, 2024 // 0 Comments

Operation Petticoat/Guns of Navarone

No Bank Holiday is complete without a classic war film and on Friday I watched two. I was new to Operation Petticoat (1959) directed by Blake Edwards. Edwards is best known for the Pink Panther movies but, aside from comedy, he also directed the hard-headed film on alcoholism Days of Wine and Roses [...]

May 5, 2024 // 0 Comments

Titanic

Having listened to all of the episodes on ‘The Rest is History’ podcast on the Titanic, which took the listener through its building for White Star lines in the Harland and Wolff shipbuilding yards in Belfast to its sinking when it hit a iceberg in April 1912, I then decided to watch [...]

April 9, 2024 // 0 Comments

All The Light We Cannot See/Anthony Doerr

For those who do not enjoy reading, or may be intimidated by a 500 page book, you can start – as I did – with the Netflix film starring Mark Ruffalo and Hugh Laurie. I was sufficiently engaged – and thought the film may not have done justice to the novel – to read the book. [...]

March 5, 2024 // 0 Comments

Don’t Look Now/Radio 3

Many a well-known film or play has started life as a radio play – Bill Naughton’s Alfie being an example. Don’t Look Now, the 1973 film directed by Nicholas Roeg starring Donald Sutherland and Julie Christie, is so well-known that many may not be aware that its source was a short [...]

March 4, 2024 // 0 Comments

Full Contact/Six Nations documentary (Netflix)

A colleague on the Rust asked me if I had seen this documentary. As I had not, I watched it on Wednesday night and was disappointed. I am no fan of “fly-on-the-wall” documentaries. Vast amounts of money are expended in return for granting access to “where-the-fan-cannot-go” [...]

February 2, 2024 // 0 Comments

Two unwatchable films/Maestro & Saltburn

If Maestro and Saltburn are acclaimed as two of the best films of 2023 I would not like to see the two worst. I thought Maestro was the biopic of Leonard Bernstein but it is not; it is the story of his marriage his wife played by Carey Mulligan. She occupies the film stage front, left and centre [...]

January 5, 2024 // 0 Comments

Art of Film/Comedy/Sky Arts

Last night Ian Nathan presented the latest in the series on comedy. It’s obviously hard to cover this vast topic in an hour but nonetheless I was disappointed by the omissions. Mel Brooks and The Producers got a deserved mention but not Woody Allen. Although the point was made that comedy [...]

November 24, 2023 // 0 Comments

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