Outcast of the Islands – Classic DVD
(Carol Reed, 1951, Studio Canal, PG) Carol Reed was acclaimed as an important new talent when Graham Greene, as film critic of the Spectator, reviewed his second film as a director, Midshipman Easy, in 1935. After the second world war they found fame, ...
Faust – review
This ponderous movie is regarded by its writer-director, the talented Russian mystic Alexander Sokurov, as the concluding section of a quartet of films on the subject of the corrupting effects of power, following on from his biographical studies of Hit...
Headhunters – review
Jo Nesbø's novel has been expertly transformed into a cool, brutal, deeply Scandinavian thrillerThe cinema, as Karl Marx might have said, repeats itself, first as a Scandinavian thriller, then as a Hollywood remake. An American company acquired the ri...
Babycall – review
This intriguing Norwegian thriller stars the queen of the current Scandinavian crime wave, Noomi Rapace, who played the impressive, expressive, mercurial Lisbeth Salander in the film versions of Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy. Here she's Anna, a si...
Philip French’s classic DVD: The Devils
(Ken Russell, 1971, BFI, 18)Ken Russell's best work was done by the early 1970s. First his poetic TV essays on Elgar and Delius. Then, for the big screen, his bravely flamboyant adaptation of Lawrence's Women in Love and this sensational adaptation of ...
The Raven – review
A drunken, drug-taking, penniless Edgar Allan Poe (John Cusack) spends the last week of his brief life staggering around a gloomy Baltimore in 1849 pursued by a ludic copycat serial killer, who recreates gory scenes from Poe's morbid stories, "The Murd...
John Carter 3D – review
Between 1917 and his death in 1950, the prolific pulp author Edgar Rice Burroughs, creator of Tarzan and founder of the Los Angeles district of Tarzana, wrote SF tales about the intrepid space adventurer John Carter, whom he described as "a splendid sp...
Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close – review
The adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer's 9/11 novel begins promisingly, but soon drowns in treacly sentimentalityIn 2001, the twin towers of the World Trade Centre were an unloved New York landmark that became overnight a palpable absence on the s...
A Dangerous Method – review
David Cronenberg analyses the pioneering work of Jung and Freud in this engrossing and thought-provoking dramaDavid Cronenberg has long been recognised as a prime exponent of the psychological thrillers known as body horror movies, stories of terror in...
Journey 2: The Mysterious Island – review
This new Jules Verne adventure yarn is a sequel to the ingenuous but surprisingly popular 3D version of Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The morose Josh Hutcherson, the only survivor from the earlier film, receives a coded message from...
Patience (After Sebald) – review
This modest, immensely enjoyable documentary is about one of my favourite books, The Rings of Saturn by the German poet and critic WG Sebald, who was born in 1944, taught for much of his adult life in this country, mainly at the University of East Angl...
War Horse – review
The madness of war is exposed by a stallion in Spielberg's emotional, no-holds-barred moral epicSteven Spielberg has been working in Britain off and on for 30 years now, long enough in fact to have been awarded an honorary knighthood. But a few days ag...
