THE HIDDEN FORTRESS
dir. Akira Kurosawa
STAR WARS (original cut)
dir. George Lucas
It was all down to luck. On Thursday a friend gave me a copy of what appears to be the most elaborate (on disc) DVD bootleg I’ve yet seen, a copy of the origina[…]

Or maybe: Sir Michael Caine should be a national treasure.
I’m not sure which of these statements I agree with most.
What’s indisputable is that the quality of his acting should not be celebrated. His performances are, almost without exce[…]

The Legend
I just watched this tremendous Jet Li film again, and it has one absolutely magnificent role, that of Jet Li’s mother, played by Josephine Liao. [um, spoiler alert and all that, if it’s applicable to an old movie that’s b[…]

This month’s Sight and Sound features a review of Takashi Miike’s new film Gozu, and tentatively calls 2001’s Visitor Q his masterpiece. The reviewer’s take on Miike’s prolific career (Visitor Q and Ichi the Killer are c[…]

FT Top 100 Films
39: THE BREAKFAST CLUB
HEY! HEY! HEY! HEY!
The thing about The Breakfast Club is that it’s the only one of the bratpack movies that’s really about school. In (most of) the others, school is there (apart from the couple t[…]

An alien in my salad
You can always tell when a new brood of creative caterpillars has successfully survived its infancy in advertising and grown into beautiful butterflies.
Suddenly, for a few months, those dull, formulaic, panel-tested commercial b[…]

Great Teletext TV Listings Of Our Time
1640 BRILLIANT CREATURES A girl reveals how she was trapped in a toilet by a spitting cobra[…]

FT Top 100 Films
40: GINGER SNAPS
Odd that I was talking about Catwoman earlier, as here is a film where a girl turns into a wolf. Not Wolfgurl, and this is certainly no superhero movie. This is probably the smartest werewolf movie since An American […]

So there are these women right, who throughout history have worn cat masks. All of whom, one imagines, were brought back to life by stinky cat breath and then went leaping around like – well actually not like a cat because cats can’t clim[…]

Why the weird dry gulch years of movie trailers? — a general observation here. Trailers in the 1930s through 1950s/60s seem to be a classic mishmash of screen projections (“A CAST OF THOUSANDS! LIONS EATING EXTRAS!”), random colla[…]