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In early January this year, the Guy Ritchie spy comedy thriller Operation Fortune: Ruse de Guerre — a typically frenetic Ritchie actioner starring Jason Statham, Aubrey Plaza and Hugh Grant — started earning decent figures around the world. In Russia, it topped 9 million, while in Australia it passed 4 million. In Saudi Arabia — where action films have often punched above their weight — the film helped ensure Avatar: The Way of Water enjoyed a solitary week at number one (and was only kept off the top spot itself by local hit Sattar). So far, so “yeah, so what?”

But the interesting thing about Operation Fortune’s, ahem, fortune, is that it was all achieved without a U.S. distributor in place. In fact, it was only on Feb. 13 — by which time the film had amassed 29 million internationally — that Lionsgate announced it had acquired the feature, setting a March 3 domestic release date.

While undoubtedly not...

UK correspondent Lee Broughton returns with coverage of a well-realised Spaghetti Western, Michele Lupo’s irony-laden semi-comedy Ben & Charlie. The film’s eponymous anti-heroes are played by fan favourites Giuliano Gemma and George Eastman and the duo receive great support from a number of familiar faces including Marisa Mell, Aldo Sambrell and Giacomo Rossi Stuart.

Ben & Charlie

Region-Free Blu-ray

Explosive Media GmbH

1972 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 113 min. / Amigo, Stay Away; Amico, stammi lontano almeno un palmo / Street Date, 28 October 2021 / Available from Explosive Media / £22.99

Starring: Giuliano Gemma, George Eastman, Vittorio Congia, Luciano Lorcas, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Remo Capitani, Nello Pazzafini, Marisa Mell, Aldo Sambrell, Roberto Camardiel.

Cinematography: Aristide Massaccesi

Production Designer: Dario Micheli

Film Editor: Antonietta Zita

Original Music: Gianni Ferrio

Written by Luigi Montefiori and Sergio Donati

Produced by Lucio Bompani

Directed by Michele Lupo

Charlie (George Eastman) patiently waits outside of a Mexican prison so that he can give his...

Lee Broughton returns with a review of Michele Lupo’s fine-looking Spaghetti Western, Arizona Colt. Giuliano Gemma stars as the eponymous anti-hero-cum-bounty killer who goes head-to-head with Fernando Sancho’s villainous Mexican bandit. The show’s collateral damage comes in the shapely form of fan favourite Rosalba Neri while its highly reluctant love interest is played by none other than Corinne Marchand, of Cleo from 5 to 7 fame.

Arizona Colt

Region Free Blu-ray

Wild East

1966 / Color / 2.35:1 widescreen / 116 min. / Il Pistolero di Arizona, The Man From Nowhere / Street Date 9 February 2021 / Available from Wild East / 16.95

Starring: Giuliano Gemma, Fernando Sancho, Corinne Marchand, Roberto Camardiel, Rosalba Neri, Nello Pazzafini, Jose Manuel Martin, Andrea Bosic.

Cinematography: Guglielmo Mancori

Film Editor: Antonietta Zita

Art director: Walter Patriarca

Original Music: Francesco De Masi

Written by Ernesto Gastaldi, Luciano Martino

Produced by Elio Scardamaglia

Directed by Michele Lupo

A sadistic bandit, Gordo (Fernando Sancho), expands his gang...

By Fred Blosser

I saw many, many Italian-made sword-and-toga movies as a kid in the early 1960s at the Kayton, my neighborhood movie house, where they usually played on mismatched double-bills with B-Westerns, British “Carry On” comedies, low-budget noir dramas, and fourth-run Elvis movies. Many of these Italian epics were simplistic and formulaic, as if the producers figured that people had come to see spectacle, sex, and sword-fights, and never mind anything else. Regardless, more ambitious productions occasionally surfaced with slightly more dramatic substance and marginally higher production values. One such entry was “The Colossus of Rhodes” (1961), Sergio Leone’s first acknowledged directorial credit preceding his breakthrough success with “A Fistful of Dollars” in 1964. The Warner Archive Collection has released the 1961 movie on Blu-ray with audio commentary by Sir Christopher Frayling, Leone’s biographer and longtime critical champion.

The script co-written by Leone has plenty of plot -- almost too much,...

Those who have suggested that The Review Show's move from BBC2 to BBC4 signals the end for the programme are wrong, but the reduction to once a month is a travesty

After almost 20 years on mainstream TV, The Review Show is being shunted to BBC4, its weekly slot reduced to a monthly cameo. As John Dugdale wrote in last week's issue, the messages coming from BBC management are, in the words of my fellow panellist Anne McElvoy, "executive code for likely death". I'd known for a while of the quiet euthanasia that was being performed on the programme that I'd loved since, as a pimply teenager, I'd tuned into Tom Paulin, Tony Parsons and Allison Pearson chewing over the cultural significance of Toy Story on the Late Review. Now the world knew too, and a half-hearted #savethereviewshow campaign briefly fizzled into life on Twitter. I made the trip up to...

Look for the Woman Richmond Shepard Theatre

I am leery about attending "slice-of-life" plays. The phrase is credited to French playwright Jean Jullien of the late 19th/early 20th Century, as a goal for those who wished to emphasize naturalism as an antidote to the stiff artificial theater of his era. For me, the phrase had come to mean gritty, often vulgar and clichéd dramas about colorless people "trying to be a somebody" against the odds of their circumstances, and on and on. Yet, how delightfully pleased I am to have attended Look for the Woman, a new play by Christie Perfetti. Look for the Woman, with fine direction by Matilda Szydagis, skillfully elevates and exalts the slice-of-life family drama and generously presents a thoughtful and moving evening of theater.

The play takes place over two days, a wake and the following day of the funeral, in an unidentified small town in Upstate New York,...

Film-maker with a 'faultless painter's eye' who won several awards, including the Prix Italia for Maids and Madams for Channel 4

Mira Hamermesh, who has died aged 88, was a film-maker of the first rank. Several women have made, or are making, superlative documentaries for British television. Hamermesh was of their number. The films were carefully constructed and beautifully composed – the writer Fay Weldon said she had "a faultless painter's eye". But they also dealt in ideas; Mira made us think.

She was born in Lodz, Poland's second city, the youngest of three children, to middle-class Jewish parents. Around the time of her birth, Lodz had just over 600,000 inhabitants; 200,000 of them Jews. In September 1939, the Wehrmacht arrived in Lodz. At once, they made it brutally clear that Jews would have no rights, no place there. In November, Mira decided to leave; she would try to reach an elder sister, a Zionist,...

Put your dancing shoes on, because on October 4, the film Jig will be available on DVD and Bluray.

Jig is the remarkable story of the 40th Irish Dancing World Championships, held in March 2010 in Glasgow. Three thousand dancers, their families and teachers from around the globe descend upon Glasgow for one drama filled week. Clad in wigs, make up, fake tan, diamantes and dresses costing thousands of pounds they compete for the coveted world titles. A year of incredibly hard work for just a few tense minutes on stage. This feature length documentary was given access for the very first time to the little known world of competitive Irish Dancing. With financial backing from BBC Scotland and Creative Scotland award‐winning filmmaker Sue Bourne went behind the normally closed doors of Irish Dancing and found a remarkable world. Wonderful characters of all ages from across the globe..Ireland, Holland, Britain,...

Jig

Stars: Brogan McCay, Julia O Rourke, Joe Bitter, John Carey | Directed by Sue Bourne

Jig focuses on the stories of a selection of kids/teenagers competing in the Irish Dancing World Championships. It follows the dancers from their training, through to their final performances, intercut with talking head interviews with their family and their instructors along with they, the performers, themselves.

Being a niche performing discipline, it would be fair to say that some extra explanation may have been needed, and the documentary does well to explain the ins and outs of the competition. However, it stops there and dives straight into following the various performers and how much money they have to spend on their wigs and shoes and clothing for these performances and slowly it spirals into something more akin to a BBC Three documentary.

There is no history of Irish dancing or any background into the style of dancing,...

Las Vegas -- Interest in 3D cinema in the wake of boxoffice tsunami "Avatar" is sending exhibitors back to the classroom.

A ShoWest University seminar in theater and booth presentation for 3D was filled to overflowing here Tuesday. It was the kind of specs-and-all presentation traditionally offered at the annual ShoWest exhibition confab, along with keynote speeches on loftier topics and screenings of upcoming movies.

Digital cinema vet and blogger Bill Mead kicked things off with an overview of the four main digital 3D systems: RealD, Dolby, Xpand and Masterimage.

Technicolor and Oculus offer competing film-based 3D systems.

"A valid argument can be made for any of these systems, depending on the needs of any individual customer," Mead told a conference room packed with exhibs and tech-company reps.

RealD dominates the domestic 3D market, with the four companies carving up the rest of the world a bit more evenly. RealD...

Jack Black has said he is worried that Barack Obama will axe Tenacious D from a benefit event in September. The comic claimed that his band's previous political endorsements had "killed" campaigns and insisted that he would not be upset if Obama snubbed them. "We've been doing political benefits for years and it's an endorsement," he told WENN. "I did it for [Senator] John Carey and that didn't work. We've supported lots of different causes; tried to legalise weed and that didn't (more)...