Spirited Away

I don’t often sit down to write a review intending to convince everyone that reads it to go see the movie in question.  You’ve got your blockbusters, and chick flicks, action movies and art house films and raunchy teen comedies and sci-fi and kiddie stuff and so on and so on… and most people seem

Recurring Hitchcock – where do I begin?

He’s been dead nearly thirty years now, but the man who practically invented the psychological thriller, conceived and delivered our very idea of filmic suspense, and took horror from 50’s b-grade kitsch into the realm of true terror continues to haunt the psyches of young directors hoping to emulate the master. It seems everyone from

Once Upon a Time in Mexico – revisited

I have a secret love for action flicks – and there are those in my collection I can watch over and over and never ever get bored. It hit me about half an hour into Once Upon a Time in Mexico that this might be the perfect date flick – as long as you’ve got

Pan’s Labyrinth

It’s 1944, five years after the end of  Spanish Civil. The close of WWII in Europe is at hand. Ten year old Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) and her heavily pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) travel to a remote fascist outpost in the Spanish forest, where they will join her new husband, Capitán Vidal (Sergi López). A

I Served the King of England

This dazzler from the Czech Republic coyly weaves a subtle dash of magic realism into the life of an ordinary little man, a Prague waiter who dreams of becoming a millionaire. We meet Jan Díte (Ivan Barnev and Oldrich Kaiser) as he exits a Czech prison sometime in the 60s, grateful for the amnesty that

Sauna

High-brow Finnish horror washes all your sins away

Three from Luis Buñuel

Un Chien Andalou put both Salvador Dali and Luis Buñuel on the map with its opening scene of a young woman passively submitting as her eyeball is sliced open with a razor. An eye-opener even today, in 1929 it was positively shocking – resulting in the movie running in theatres for nearly a year. One

Silent Hitchcock… Shhh…

Two silents from the Master of Suspense…

Quelles Horreurs!

While some of us object to the invasion of American Halloween and K-mart clad ghosts and goblins knocking at the door demanding treats, we would do well to recall that the holiday is rooted in the Druid Samhain – the last day of the ancient Celtic summer – a between-seasons day, when the dead walked

Marlon Brando: More than a contender

By the end of his life, Marlon Brando was often portrayed as a buffoon, a colossal wreck of a man, whose personal tragedies dominated his life; irrelevant to moviegoers three generations removed from his tormented, “Stella! Hey Stellaaaaa!” Yet Brando’s sweaty muscle-bound Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire set a new standard of performance,