One of the finds at Pulp bookshop in Montreal on my last visit was Alice Friedman’s QUEER MODERNS: MAX EWING’S JAZZ AGE NEW YORK. Max Ewing (1903-34) was a writer/photographer/ man-about-town from …

It was a sadness to see the Southwark Playhouse half-empty for Simon Reade’s adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s TWENTY THOUSAND STREETS UNDER THE SKY. Hamilton wrote the books on which GASLIGHT, ROPE…

Aside from one of the greatest endings in all film history, two things stood out in my latest viewing of THE ROARING TWENTIES (Raoul Walsh, 1939), in a gorgeous 4K Digital Restoration at the BFI. O…

I left my nephew and his kids and braved a thunderstorm to see A FISTFULL OF DOLLARS (Sergio Leone, 1964) at the Cinema Moderne last night. It was a sold-out screening. I was put on a waiting list …

Magical experience watching THE PHILDALPHIA STORY in the 4K restoration with Chris and my sister amidst a goof size audience at the Cinema Moderne yesterday. Everybody laughed in all the right plac…

The biggest surprise at my screening of PRESSURE (Anthony Maras, 2026) at Cineworld was the elderly woman in a wheelchair vaping huge clouds of smoke and a smell I initially thought was some kind o…

"Drugstore Cowboy" is one of the best films in the long tradition of American outlaw road movies - a tradition that includes "Bonnie and Clyde," "Easy Rider,"

It’s interesting what the worlds of romantic comedy tell us. In the great Doris Day/ Rock Hudson hits of the late 50’s/ early 60s, we were shown a rich, sophisticated, vibrantly coloured world with…

Reviews of THE DOG STARS were so muted that I was surprised I liked it as much as I did and now suspect it will be one of those Ridley Scott films (like, recently, THE COUNSELOR and THE LAST DUEL) …

BITTER CHRISTMAS is about an aging director who’s having trouble finding an original idea, keeps cannibalising his old work, can’t let go of the death of his mother, and it turns out the movie you’…

We saw two musicals yesterday, both wonderful experiences. The matinee was an am dram production of A CHORUS LINE at the Putney Arts Theatre. I saw the last professional production at the Palladium…

In PERSONA (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) , an actress has a nervous breakdown while performing ELECTRA and stops speaking. The basic conceit in Benedict Andrews’ play is to combine the two; the first part…

Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music. In 2023, Warner Bros. announced the completion of Coyote vs. Acme, a family film in which Looney Tunes’ Wile E…

DODES’KA-DEN (Akira Kurosawa, 1970). The title is onomatopoeia, the equivalent in English of ‘clackety-clack.’  It begins with a young boy and his mother. She prays as he gets ready to ‘go to work’…

Kurosawa saw RED BEARD (1965) as a turning point in his filmmaking, acknowledging that his subsequent films would be different. The film shows no traces of all the experiments with sound, ed…

Horror is surely the most deconstructed genre in film, the slasher the most deconstructed subgenre therein, and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma may be the most deconstructy of all such cinemat…

Kagemusha (1985)   The legends around this are many. Even after Kurosawa won an Oscar for Best Foreign Film for DESU UZALA (the film he’d made in 1975 in the Soviet Union) he could not get fin…

Inspired by Tolstoy’s THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH, is a simple story of a bureaucrat (the great Takashi Shimura, in his first starring role for Kurosawa) who’s spent all his life in a boring administr…

In between SEVEN SAMURAI (1954) and THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), Kurosawa directed I LIVE IN FEAR, a critical and box office failure that brings up the old adage, was it by Sarris (?), that went somethi…

Kurosawa followed is adaptation of Macbeth, THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), in which he deployed the basic premise and some of the structure but none of the dialogue, with yet another adaptation of a class…

Kurosawa’s THE IDIOT (1951), an adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s novel set in post-war Japan, was originally conceived as a 265 minute film with an intermission. That cut didn’t work for the studio and …

Last night’s Kurosawa was THRONE OF BLOOD (1957), which made me think of the poetic in cinema, which I take to be something like a complex idea or feeling communicated precisely through a minimum o…

Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music. Half a century since its 1972 release, Bob Fosse’s Cabaret remains startlingly sexy, funny and politically unsettlin…

ROSHOMON (Akira Kurosawa, 1950) is one of those films you hear so much about that you feel you’ve seen it, though in my case I hadn’t. The name of the film has come to stand for a type of narrative…

Very enjoyable but perhaps the least successful of the Kurosawas I’ve been seeing recently. Each individual episode is masterfully shot but the film as a whole doesn’t cohere. It begins as a light …

A lovely film that makes me think of the extent to which working people have been evacuated from cinema. In this one, two young people in a Tokyo, occupied, in ruins, and with black marketeers putt…

For the first 55 minutes HIGH AND LOW (Akira Kurosawa, 1963) is a sparse and minimalist chamber piece in which moral and ethical considerations are put into play. Mr. Gondo’s business associates pr…

Another extraordinary crime film from Akira Kurosawa, this one dealing with corporate corruption. What I found most remarkable was the story-telling, of which the opening scene is an extraordinary …

Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music. The End of Oak Street puts Mike in mind of the sort of disposable but likeable films he watched on video as a child,…

I’d only really been familiar with Kurosawa’s famous samurai films. The post-war noirs in the BFI’s box set have been a discovery: the more I see of them the more my admiration for Kurosawa as a fi…

https://notesonfilm1.com/2026/07/31/cinema-rediscovered-2026-wrap-up/ Pastor Hall (Roy Boulting, 1940)/ Obsession (Edward Dmytryk, 1949) Richard I talk about two films screened recently at Cinema Red

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A noir that well showcases Kurosawa’s capacity for film poetry and a young Toshiro Mifune at his most beautiful. Mifune is Matsunaga a small-time Yakuza who runs everything that can be turned to cr…

‘All men are bad’ says a Judge in LE CERCLE ROUGE (Jean-Pierre Melville, 1970), ‘they’re born innocent but are quickly corrupted. In this film, two of the main ones are crooks: Corey (Alain Delon) …

Two men are in love with the same women but only one is married to her. The trio lose track of time when walking in the countryside and find shelter in a monastery, where Brothers of the Order of S…

I had never heard of POPPERS (José María Castellví, 1984), until I came across it on the marvellous box set of Spanish ‘S’ classified films of the transition, EXORCISMO: DEFYING A DICTATOR A…

Many years ago, my old university was hosting a “film and philosophy” conference. Not having the interest or intellectual clout to submit a paper to deliver, I was nevertheless roped in to guide th…

Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Spotify, or YouTube Music. We’ve tuned out of Marvel on the podcast for a little while, but one of the eternally entertaining superheroes…

https://notesonfilm1.com/2026/07/31/cinema-rediscovered-2026-wrap-up/ As ever Richard and I loved attending this year’s edition of Cinema Rediscovered at the Watershed in Bristol. They do so many thin