Blu-ray Review: La Grande Illusion – Renoir’s Masterpiece Has Never Looked Better
Everyone who has ever claimed to be a movie buff should own this film, and this is the best version of it that has ever been released.
I've been a film geek since childhood, and am yet to find a cure. Not an auteurist, but my favourite directors include Robert Altman, Ernst Lubitsch, Welles, Hitch and Kurosawa. I also love Powell & Pressburger movies, anything with Fred Astaire, Cary Grant or Katherine Hepburn, the space-ballet of 2001, Ealing comedies, subversive genre cinema and that bit in The Producers with the fountain.
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Everyone who has ever claimed to be a movie buff should own this film, and this is the best version of it that has ever been released.
The film received an enthusiastic response on its premiere, at the Glasgow Film Festival, and screened to an equally enthused crowd last week at Bathgate’s Regal Theatre.
Obviously a must-buy for any Hammer fan and a good introduction to those new to the films, although it’s not among the studio’s absolute best.
All of these films were released in the UK in 2011 (which is a long way of saying I haven’t seen Shame)…
Lurking somewhere within the half-decent little B-movie that is Mimic there is a far better little B-movie. It’s curious that this new Blu-Ray edition comes advertised as the ‘Director’s Cut,’ a designation which director Guillermo Del Toro seems to approve [...]
If the quality of mainstream American horror started to wane in the 1990s, that downward trajectory continued unhindered into the 21st century. If a horror movie was in the box office top 10 at any given point, more likely than [...]
Mainstream horror entered something of a grey zone during the 1990s as even fans of the tentpole slasher franchises got bored with sequels and rehashes.
Something that connects a lot of 1980s movies, particularly ones that have developed cult followings, is that their audiences didn’t exactly know what they were in for.
When we think of the great horror performances of the last 100 years, the tendency is immediately to think of the monsters and killers: Anthony Perkins, Bela Lugusi, Max Schreck.
Despite the fact it’s based on a book from the ’40s, and set on the last day of the Second World War, the hero of Andrzej Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds is, like the movie, a product of the 1950s. He’s [...]
By my reckoning three masterpieces of the genre were released in 1960. All three involve a character with obsessions that eventually destroy him, but only after a string of other deaths.
Pretty much all of the techniques and trademarks we associate with Quentin Tarantino are in Jackie Brown, yet many still think of it as the least Tarantinoesque (it’s not a name that lends itself to adjectives) of his work. Perhaps [...]
