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Horror picture "Longlegs" is proving to be a surprising box office success. A lot of credit must go to indie studio Neon's marketing campaign, which was scary enough to get people paying attention, yet restrained enough to not give the whole movie away.

Starring Maika Monroe as FBI Agent Lee Harker, "Longlegs" follows the hunt for a serial killer, played by a well-disguised Nicolas Cage. Cage's killer character is mercifully kept at a distance or off-screen for most of the movie; the rare times we get an up-close look, it's like we're intruding on something devilish.

Director Osgood Perkins' previous films have felt a bit too empty for me. The procedural core of "Longlegs," though, gives the movie enough of a skeleton that I could appreciate Perkins' craftsmanship without it trying my patience. Is "Longlegs" the scariest movie ever? No, but it is the movie equivalent of a page-turner,...

Stars: Karlheinz Bohm, Maxine Audley, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Brenda Bruce, Esmond Knight, Martin Miller, Michael Goodliffe, Jack Watson, Shirley Anne Field | Written by Leo Marks | Directed by Michael Powell

Originally released 64 years ago (!) and a Martin Scorsese favourite, Peeping Tom has already had a UK release from StudioCanal, with a print restored in association with The Film Foundation and the BFI National Archive; and now comes another release, this time in the US courtesy of the Criterion Collection.

My immediate reaction, almost from the opening scene is that for a film that was made so long ago, it has aged extremely well and I imagine it might have seemed quite shocking at the time.

That does seem to be the case as “on its initial release in 1960, Peeping Tom received a savage reception from critics who were dismayed by its controversial subject matter and the sympathy it seems to engender for its murderous protagonist.

Stars: Karlheinz Bohm, Maxine Audley, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Brenda Bruce, Esmond Knight, Martin Miller, Michael Goodliffe, Jack Watson, Shirley Anne Field | Written by Leo Marks | Directed by Michael Powell

Released 64 years ago (!!!), a Martin Scorsese favourite, Peeping Tom, is getting a special edition 4K release this year after being restored by The Film Foundation and BFI National Archive in association with StudioCanal.

This was a first-time watch for me, and my immediate reaction, almost from the opening scene is that for a film that was made so long ago, it has aged extremely well and I imagine it might have seemed quite shocking at the time.

That does seem to be the case as “on its initial release in 1960, Peeping Tom received a savage reception from critics who were dismayed by its controversial subject matter and the sympathy it seems to engender for its murderous protagonist.” It then remained...

This lesser-known suspense thriller is an excellent adaptation of a novel by Graham Greene, and a fine showcase for actor Anthony Hopkins and the upcoming Kristin Scott Thomas, with an able assist from Derek Jacobi. A Paris lawyer is sentenced to die as a random hostage of the German occupiers, but swaps with another prisoner with a desperate, questionable death-cell contract. Three years later, he must pretend not to be himself when he returns to the house he traded for his life, to face a woman who has sworn to kill the man who allowed her brother to die. Fans of Hannibal Lecter will be impressed by Hopkins’ deep, absorbing performance — the show’s moral tension and strange twists of fate are quite moving.

The Tenth Man

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1988 / Color / 2:35 1:85 1:66 widescreen 1:37 Academy / 99 min. / Street Date August 30, 2022 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Kristin Scott Thomas,...

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By Hank Reineke

Following the success of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960-61, there was – forgive me – a “mad” rush to cash in on that film’s coattails. On one side of the pond, U.S. based pastiches of Psycho would come courtesy of Shlock-horror maestro William Castle. The gimmicky producer would rush out the psychological-thriller Homicidal in 1961 and, a bit later - and more famously - with Joan Crawford in Straiht- Jacket (1964). In England, Hammer Film Productions, riding high due to their reimagining of the classic “Universal” monsters, would likewise bring to the screen four psych-thrillers of similar temperament: Paranoiac and Maniac in 1963, Hysteria and Nightmare in 1965.

One of the connecting threads of this quartet of Hammer efforts were that all scenarios had been dutifully scribed by their “house writer” of sorts, Jimmy Sangster. In his entertaining autobiography Do You Want it Good or Tuesday?...

While us horror lovers revelled in the ripped bodices and cobwebbed corridors of another vampire plagued castle, Hammer was busy trying to clear the halls and make their way into the modern world. Take Nightmare (1964), an effective black and white thriller that shows you don’t need fangs to be fearsome.

Released in its native U.K. in April and stateside in June, Nightmare (Aka the amazing Here’s the Knife, Dear: Now Use It) still has a lot of wandering down darkened hallways, but instead of coming up against the undead, our heroine has to do battle with her own brittle mind. Or has the dead come back for her?

Pity poor Janet (Jennie Linden – Old Dracula). Our film opens with her hearing a distant voice calling her name. She leaves the comfort of her bed and follows the whispered voice which leads her to a shadowed room where...

French film theorist André Bazin thought that cinema was unique from any other art form thanks to its ability to represent reality. In his seminal essay "The Ontology of the Photographic Image," Bazin wrote that "Photography and cinema...are discoveries that satisfy, once and for all and in its very essence, our obsession with realism." To clarify, Bazin did not believe that the cinema is reality. Rather, cinema provides a representation of reality that satisfies certain psychological desires of the viewer and the artist. As he begins the essay, "If the plastic arts were put under psychoanalysis, the practice of embalming the dead might turn out to be a fundamental factor in their creation. The process might reveal that at the origin of painting and sculpture there lies a mummy complex."

Years later, when film was put under psychoanalysis thanks to the work of theorists like Laura Mulvey, Bazin's hypothesis took an uncomfortable turn.

Rereleased, the 1948 ballet classic stands the test of time. By Peter Bradshaw

The Red Shoes, the 1948 classic by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, has now been vividly restored for a cinema rerelease and it just blazes out of the screen: profoundly serious, sublimely innocent, yet deeply and mysteriously erotic. This is the compelling parable of the destructive demands made by art upon the artist, and upon performing artists expected to sublimate their emotions into a quasi-sexual submission to their director – a parable that seems to change into a portrait of psychotic disorder or actual demonic possession. It is also, incidentally, a portrait of an age in which the marriage contract instantly nullified a woman's professional identity. Moira Shearer is the beautiful English ingenue Vicky Page, who, on the premature retirement of her ballet company's leading lady, is catapulted to the position of prima ballerina. She has been promoted by Boris Lermontov,...