Category: Films
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LFF: Seberg
Note: The next few entries will be devoted to the recent London Film Festival. Normal service will follow afterwards! Like many people, I really don’t know an awful lot about Jean Seberg beyond her scintillating performance in A Bout De Souffle (Breathless). That was a film I first discovered when I won a VHS copy of it…
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Flixster Transition to Google Play
A few weeks back I noted that Flixster would be closing soon and had written to me to say that my film collection would transition to Google Play. Well last week, that time finally came to pass. The Flixster website is shutting down in December, and I’d need to migrate my digital collection to Google.…
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The Not-Live BAFTA Awards
In 2002, Ant and Dec remade the famous “No Hiding Place” episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads. This was a classic episode of the sitcom where the “lads” tried to avoid learning the result of an away England game, before highlights were shown later that evening on TV. Something that made some sense when the original version aired…
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Great Sadness
This week, the Paweł Pawlikowski film, Cold War, was released on home video. I missed this in the cinema, even though I found the film’s trailer utterly entrancing. So I thought I would treat myself to a Blu Ray copy of the film. Earlier in the week I actually saw an advertisement for the film in…
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The Dark Ages of Film History?
I was recently talking to a some colleagues at work about one of my favourite films of all time, the classic Howard Hawks screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby. Made in 1938, it stars two of Hollywood’s biggest ever stars, Kathryn Hepburn and Cary Grant, both giving terrific performances in a classic of the genre. How…
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The Death of MoviePass?
A few months ago, I tried to work out what the business model of MoviePass (and putative UK equivalent cPass) might be. I concluded that the operators were going to need very deep pockets, and there was absolutely no certainty that the model works. And that seems to have been an accurate prediction. The service…
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Netflix, Independent Cinema, and Hollywood’s New Business Model
The other day The Ringer published a piece about Netflix and their original movie strategy. The piece, entitled Netflix and Shrill listed the original movies that Netflix has already released in 2018 and challenged readers to see how many they recognised. For most people, the most familiar title will have been The Cloverfield Paradox. This…
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Blade Runner 2049
Note: There will be spoiler elements to this. So if you’ve not yet seen Blade Runner 2049, and you plan on doing so, you may want to skip this piece. I’ve been meaning to write about this for weeks now, having been both dreading and eagerly anticipating this film since I heard it was being…
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London Film Festival 2017
I went to a decent selection of films at this year’s London Film Festival, and overall was very impressed by the range and quality. There are obviously a stupidly large number of films that you can see, and while seeing some big hitters early is always nice, there’s also the opportunity to see films that…
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Thor: Ragnarok
I confess that I feel left behind by Marvel’s Cinematic Universe these days. The films come thick and fast, and I’ve not seen them all by any means. That has begun to instill in me a fear that I won’t actually fully understand a new film because I’ve missed things that happened in the last…
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Dwindling Choices
A couple of weeks ago, Ofcom released its annual Communications Market Report. It’s always stuffed full of information about the UK media marketplace that can be fascinating to dissect. In 2016, ownership of DVD players (including Blu Ray and games consoles with DVD functionality) was 67% of UK households. This year, it’s just 63% of…
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Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan is clearly one of this generation’s outstanding film makers. From Memento through to his Dark Knight trilogy, to Inception and Interstellar, he does something interesting every time. Not only are his films glorious to watch, shot with large-format film including IMAX for much of his latest, but his films are very successful at…