filmreviewradical

The 9th 'Carry on' comedy feature film released in 1964 (from the team of producer Peter Rogers and director Gerald Thomas) has an inept quartet of spies being dispatched to Vienna in pursuit of a secret formula stolen from the War Department by the milkman, and in danger of falling into the hands of STENCH. The last 'Carry on' film to be shot in black and white it's screenplay by Talbot Rothwell and Sid Colin is a spoof of the spy films of the period and features the usual double entendres, bent guns, settings such as Algiers and The Orient Express (as well as the comically 'Third Man' style Vienna), and a cast which includes Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey, Bernard Cribbins and Barbara Windsor - in her first 'Carry on' film - as well as a transgender villain. Cultural and ethnic 'stereotypes' poke through now and again. Not the best or worst 'Carry on'.

An asymmetrical production in every sense of the word. Shot on digital videotape this 2006 production is the last feature by writer/producer/director David Lynch, and in this surrealist, experimental, psychological mind dream fantasy mystery thriller (amongst other things) Lynch goes further than he's ever gone before (and now ever will go). A film actress (Laura Dern) appearing in a romantic drama (supposedly based on an unfinished film called '47' and a cursed Polish folktale) starts to experience the 'fiction' of film and the 'reality' of life as a confused, fragmented, jumbled train of thought/stream of consciousness in which time, space and events meld into each other and loop round, being intimately linked with memory, premonition, fantasy and emotion in a random seeming jigsaw puzzle in which the pieces don't seem to always fit. A rumination on fiction and reality, Hollywood and the filmmaking process, and seemingly like the symbolic nightmare fantasy of a Hollywood actress (or aspiring actress) who constructs (or deconstructs) her own mystery film within the 'Inland Empire' of her mind whilst involved in the film shoot from hell. In what other 'film' can you see 'anthropomorphic rabbits' and Jeremy Irons?