Monterey Pop was a D.A. Pennebaker documentary, made just after Don’t Look Back. It was the first major film made about a pop festival. THE event was most famous for being the breakthrough moment for Jimi Hendrix, who had just returned from the UK, ad Janis Joplin, who had recently arrived from Texas. The Who … Continue reading Monterey Pop – Blu-Ray Review
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
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