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Bottle Shock (movie)

This is the 2008 film of the Judgement of Paris which I recently reviewed. It stars Alan Rickman – excellent as he always is – as the wine expert Stephen Spurrier who set up a wine-tasting competition in Paris in which the Californian chardonnay Montelena and Stag’s Head red beat the [...]

July 4, 2023 // 0 Comments

Mephisto (1981)

This Hungarian/German production, directed by Istvan Szabo and based on a novel by Klaus Mann, launched the international film career of Klaus Maria Brandauer who was later to appear as lead villain in a Bond film. It’s story is of an ambitious but not especially talented German actor Henrik [...]

May 11, 2023 // 0 Comments

La Chiave (1983)

This film was directed by the controversial Italian director Tinto Brass. His critics castigate him as a porn producer but I think that is unfair. The story is of an ageing art historian Professor Nino Rolfe, an ageing sensualist played by Frank Finlay, who entrusts his sexual fantasies over his [...]

April 3, 2023 // 0 Comments

A Bridge Too Far

I nicknamed this Richard Attenborough film An Hour Too Long as length is one of its problems. The other is the assemblage of stars – Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Lawrence Olivier, Anthony Hopkins, Liv Ullmann, Robert Redford, James Caan, Elliot Gould, Maximilian Schell, Hardy Kruger, Edward [...]

April 2, 2023 // 0 Comments

Military Wives

On Saturday evening I settled down without much initial anticipation to Military Wives, directed by Peter Carraneo, whose most successful movie to date was The Full Monty. This film is of the same genre: a group of diverse, same sex, people decided to form a choir at an army barracks whilst their [...]

February 27, 2023 // 0 Comments

All Quiet on the Western Front

Although All Quiet on the Western Front hoovered up the BAFTA awards I was a tad disappointed. It’s a German film so it was good that foreign films are recognised. The story is of German school friends who, persuaded by the xenophobic rhetoric of their headmaster, became conscripts in the [...]

February 21, 2023 // 0 Comments

Gina Lollobrigida R.I.P

I was saddened to learn of the passing of La Lollo. Of the big three Italian post war stars – Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale and Gina Lollobrigida – she was my favourite. Sophia Loren, guided by her husband Carlo Ponte, had the bigger Hollywood career, Claudia Cardinale was the more [...]

January 18, 2023 // 0 Comments

Cleopatra (1963)

In a humorous campus novel by David Lodge a group of academics specialising in English literature debate the most important classic novel that they never read. One wins by confessing he has never read one word by Jane Austen. Last year at the San Sebastian film festival, over a fine dinner attended [...]

January 3, 2023 // 0 Comments

Adapting classic books to film

A post on whether books or films are the best way to appreciate World War Two generated an interesting discussion which I would like to extend to classic literature. Over the so-called festive period I saw film adaptations of Jane Austen’s Emma and Charles Dickens Great Expectations. Emma starred [...]

December 29, 2022 // 0 Comments

The Guns at Last Light/Rick Atkinson

The Guns at Last Light is the final volume of the Liberation Trilogy detailing the American military World War Two campaigns of North Africa, Sicily and Italy and in this book the Normandy Landings and their aftermath. It is immensely detailed: a blow by blow, day by day, account with exhaustive [...]

December 17, 2022 // 0 Comments

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