The Pumpkin Eater is a Jack Clayton film from 1964 (Clayton is best known for his Turn of the Screw adaptation, The Innocents.) It’s essentially a marriage breakdown movie, but it’s shot kind of like a horror film, which is an interesting touch. Jake (Peter Finch) and his wife Jo (Anne Bancroft) are an upper-middle-class … Continue reading The Pumpkin Eater – Blu-Ray Review
The Cremator is based on a book by Ladislav Fuks, whose work was largely about the impact of the Nazi occupation on Czechoslovakia. Fuks also co-authored the screenplay. The narrative follows a professional cremator in Prague just before the Nazi invasion. He becomes increasingly deranged as tensions rise, and eventually gets involved with the Nazis. It … Continue reading The Cremator – Blu-Ray Review
Carrie was the film that kind of blew Brian de Palma’s career up after he had made a series of Godard-esque comedies, Greetings and Hi, Mom!, after which he did a strange comedy Get to Know Your Rabbit for WB, and the Hitchcockian thriller Sisters, the first pure “de Palma film” as we know it. That … Continue reading Carrie (1976) – Blu-Ray Review
The title refers to the 78 camera setups and 52 cuts that were required to complete perhaps the most famous scene in all of cinema: the shower sequence in Alfred Hitchocck's Psycho. This documentary is a look at how both that sequence and the film as a whole changed the shape of cinema, and our attitudes to … Continue reading 78/52: Hitchcock’s Shower Scene – DVD Review
Al Gore is obviously a perfect example of a politician who became a much better person after he left office. He was actually a fairly conservative Democrat, which people often forget. He even acknowledges this with a joke in the film about being ‘a recovering politician.’ It’s more of a documentary than the other film, … Continue reading An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power – DVD Review
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