It might be heresy to say that I found Ta-Nehesi Coates’ BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME – a letter to his son on surviving in America as a black man — overpraised. Toni Morrison found ‘its examinat…

Birmingham’s Mockingbird Cinema hosted the European premiere of Chinese comedy-drama It’s My Time, about a troublemaking old lady who enters the world of speedcubing – solving Rubik’s cubes as quic…

LALKA (Marciej Kawalski) is another of those films I went to see because it’s sub-titled, this one yesterday afternoon, and with less satisfying results. It’s ostensibly the most expensive film eve…

Skipped our usual Saturday dinner because I was offered a preview screening of Los Javis’ LA BOLA NEGRA and couldn’t wait to see it. It lived up to the hype – best director at Cannes, People’s Choi…

I don’t have a particular fondness for Michael Douglas. Yet, he’s been in my life as far as I can remember, beginning with THE STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO on TV. He was a key star in my formative earl…

I very much enjoyed reading Samuel Garza Bernstein’s biography of Roddy McDowall (for which many thanks to Nicky Smith) whilst also ending up feeling a bit disappointed and sad. McDowall is one of …

There are so few foreign films shown in Birmingham that I grab every opportunity. That was my only reason to see HOPE (Na Hong-jin, 2026), even though I didn’t know the director or cast, and in spi…

How could I have missed PINK ULYSSES (Eric de Kuyper, 1990)? A clear descendent of PINK NARCISSUS (James Bidgood, 1971) , a contrast, and perhaps to some antidote,  to Christopher Nolan’s THE ODYSS…

I’d given up on seeing Jonathan Groff in the all-male production of AS YOU LIKE IT at Stratford as I thought it was sold out. But a friend recommended it, saying there were tickets, and ther…

Just a few words to praise Guy Delisle’s brilliant graphic novel MUYBRIDGE. It’s beautifully told, surprising, suspenseful, entertaining; and I learned so much about early photography and time-moti…

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 …