I watch Grave Of The Vampire every couple of years—it’s one of only a handful of movies I’ve watched over and over. Occasionally, you go back to movie that you loved as a kid, and realize how little you knew about filmmaking. When I revisited “Frogs,” one of the slew of 1970’s man vs. nature…
DetailsAbsolutely Anything is Terry Jones’ first feature screenplay (written here with 65 year old Gavin Scott) since Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride in 1996 and before that, Erik The Viking in 1989. Those are also the last two features he’s directed. These yawning gaps present themselves in the form of horrendously stale jokes and awfully pedestrian – bordering on ameteurish –…
DetailsIn 2010, I wrote of El Secreto De Sus Ojos, “It is a superb film, an incredibly rich and moving crime thriller telling a story both in the present and twenty-five years in the past, utilising the streets of Buenos Aires to maximum effect and deploying some of Argentina’s finest actors … [It] transcends its crime-novel beginnings…
DetailsIf you don’t like your movies to celebrate criminals, avoid Legend, which treats London’s notorious Kray twins as if they were tragic heroes. Which should be pretty obvious by the title. In yet another stroke of awesome acting, Tom Hardy plays both twins, Reggie and Ronnie, and he does it so well that you seriously do forget…
DetailsOscar-winning doco maker Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth) has made a revealing and sweet film about Malala Yousafzai and her dad Ziauddin, which can’t help but be thirty percent or so more resonant seen in the week of the Paris attacks. Malala was shot in the face by the Taliban as Paris has metaphorically been shot in…
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