I wouldn't have been altogether surprised if Marcel Carné's first film, a short documentary from 1929 called Nogent, eldorado du dimanche (Nogent, Eldorado of Sunday) had not been particularly interesting
Watching a Hollywood movie from 1929 is like watching a Hollywood movie from 1932 played underwater. Society hadn't been revolutionized much in those few years, so the movies often have the same concerns
So, Luis Buñuel had a couples of sons, one of whom, Juan Luis Buñuel, worked as his assistant director from 1960, before going on to a directing career of his own. So, is he Jacques to his father's Maurice
Above: An heir is electrocuted by an arc light. Smoking. Pleins feux sur l'assassin, (loosely, "Open Fire at the Killer") is the 1961 film directed by Georges Franju and written by the team of Boileau
When Federico Fellini, arguing with a diehard neo-realist about the ending of Il bidone (What, it was demanded, was a troupe of seemingly medieval peasants, doing in this post-war crime story?), received
Heavily backlit like some film noir fugitive, the towering figure of Father Christmas lurches towards us from the night, a bearded Frankenstein monster, maw agape, eyes rolling, outstretched arms gyrating
"All the same, there was something going on which remains true, even when the words and pictures are mostly made up." In 1990, playwright Tom Stoppard directed a movie version of his acclaimed play
"How do you spell 'decapitated'?" America's golden age of radio drama fed into the cinema like an intravenous drip: Citizen Kane is its most precious legacy, with innovative use of sound and music honed
A strange, ringing tinnitus sound in the subway. A man, his shirt and face spattered profusely with blood, shambles in catatonic stupor up the stairs. Another man, blood gouting from a wound in his brow
One of filmmaker Ken Russell's misfortunes is that while his work is always appreciated, it's always his early work. When he was first making a splash with features in the seventies, British critics
When critic David Ehrenstein told actor Sir Ian McKellen that there existed a photograph of actor Roddy McDowell (How Green was My Valley, Planet of the Apes) performing oral sex upon himself
With the fragments of Henri-Georges Clouzot's never-completed L'enfer (1964) finally gathered together and released as part of the making-of/unmaking-of documentary Inferno (2009), now seems a good time