MovieMail Latest - Podcasts

Filmcast - Son of Man and La Vie de Jesus

Graeme looks at two very different films that take as their starting point the life of Jesus.

This week, Graeme looks at two very different films that take as their starting point the life of Jesus. The first, Mark Dornford-May's Son of Man, transposes Jesus's life to a re-imagined contemporary southern Af...

 

The Weight of Western Living

Graeme takes a look at two recent documentaries that consider the mechanisms and processes that make the habits of western life possible.

This week, Graeme takes a look at two recent documentaries that consider the mechanisms and processes that make the habits of western life possible. They are Our Daily Bread, about industrial food processing i...

 

Fever Dreams

Graeme takes a look at two films from Second Run that both feature fevered imaginings...

Graeme takes a look at two dvds from the Second Run cataogue, both of which feature fevered imaginings as part of their stories. The two films are Adoor Gopalakrishnan's 1981 tense film of familial breakdown, Rat-...

 

New Filmcast on Artists' Films from Lux

Lux films release high-quality dvds featuring the work of British artist-filmmakers.

This week, Graeme considers the selected films of two artists, both published on dvd in the UK by Lux. There's Guy Sherwin's Optical Sound Films, 1971-2007, which create a primal link between what we see and what ...

 

The Phantom Carriage: Silent Dread

Victor Sjostrom's The Phantom Carriage is one of the great films of the silent era, marrying a morality tale about the perils of drunkenness with outstanding camerawork and technical innovation on a ghostly theme....

 

I, Pierre Riviere, having slaughtered my mother, my sister and my brother...

I, Pierre Riviere... is a remarkable French film from 1976 that takes its title from Pierre Riviere's first person testimony about his actions from 1835. Director Rene Allio recreated Pierre Riviere's world in the...

 

Some Thoughts on Wim Wenders' Alice in the Cities

Wim Wenders made Alice in the Cities in 1973, at a time when he wondered if he could he make a film 'in his own handwriting'. A reflection on his own fascination and disenchantment with America, it's also, of cour...

 

Family Portraits - two films from the 1951 Festival of Britain

This week, Graeme looks at two films made for the Festival of Britain in 1951, Humphrey Jennings' Family Portrait (his last completed film) and Paul Dickson's David, a film made for the Welsh Committee. Also consi...

 

The Discreet Pleasures of Bunuel's Belle de Jour

Although Luis Bunuel is notorious for the more outrageous scenes in his films, equally as interesting are their craftsmanlike elements - the self-effacing camerawork, their dialogue, their subtle reinforcements of...

 

Bad Men's Tricks: Three films from Miklos Jancso

Happily, three of Miklos Jancso's groundbreaking films from the 1960s - My Way Home, The Round-Up and The Red and the White, are now available on DVD in the UK. Set for the most part on the wide open Hungarian pla...

 

Michelangelo Antonioni's La Notte

Michelangelo Antonioni's films La Notte and L'Eclisse show characters as part of environments that block and deflect channels of communication. In powerful compositions, using for example dominating concrete archi...

 

Hitchcock's The Lodger (or, Orlok in London)

As is well known, Alfred Hitchcock spent a formative period of time in Germany where he made his first film, The Pleasure Garden. Come his third film, The Lodger, which already features a number of the distinctive...