I saw this last Saturday with ms_siobhan at the Howard Assembly Room. This is attached to the Grand Theatre in Leeds, and operated as a cinema for much of the 20th century. It's now a recently-restored multi-purpose performance and function space, but its cinematic past is sometimes revived for one-off occasions. Last weekend this consisted of a revival of a ( Read more... )

I saw this film a few weeks ago with glitzfrau and biascut, when I went to Manchester to give a talk at the JACT AGM. I also read the book four years ago, and and thought it was pretty good.

Much of the media conversation at the time this film came out seemed to run along the lines of "Oh, The Great Gatsby is one of the great unfilmable novels! Has Luhrmann ( Read more... )

In 2007, the BFI released a digitally-restored version of this film which I was lucky enough to see on the big screen at the Bradford Fantastic Film Weekend in June 2008. Then earlier this year Hammer released a version consisting of the same BFI restoration, but now also two very brief scenes which had been cut from the original on the orders of ( Read more... )

I watched this on the plane on the way to New York, which was nice as I missed it in the cinema. Presumably, I saw a slightly censored version, as the cinema release was a 12A, and as far as I understand all films available on in-flight entertainment systems have to be a PG or below. But basically I've seen it ( Read more... )

This was the latest Cottage Classic, seen with ms_siobhan and planet_andy. I read the book 13 years ago, during my DPhil when I was living in a tiny studio apartment in Paris and researching Roman urban peripheries each day at the Bibliothèque Nationale, but I've actually never seen a film adaptation of it at all. This one seemed good, though. Charles Laughton's ( Read more... )

I'm starting to despair a little of ever getting time to write up my recent holiday spent touring around Wicker Man filming locations in Scotland with thanatos_kalos. It's partly busy-ness, and partly of course the fact that such things are rather more fun to do than to write about. But maybe I can get the juices flowing a bit by writing up my impressions on ( Read more... )

I went to stay with my parents in Birmingham this weekend, and on the Saturday evening I took my Mum out to their local art-house cinema to see this. It's a documentary about Don McCullin, a photojournalist who specialised in particular in war photography. After growing up in considerable poverty in London, he broke into the world of professional ( Read more... )

I saw this round at ms_siobhan and planet_andy's house a couple of weeks ago. As ms_siobhan explained before we began, it is one of those ghost films where you never actually see anything supernatural, but the atmosphere is nonetheless creepy as hell. Shot in beautiful black and white and set almost entirely in an empty, isolated stately home, it is all about the psychological ( Read more... )