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James Hadley Chase

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This Day That Year: Revisiting 2011’s Murder Mystery Game
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Subhash K Jha, in another great installment of This Day That Year, revisits the Abhinay Deo directed Game as the murder-mystery clocks 14 Years.

Credit must go to director Abhinay Deo and writer Althea Delmas Kaushal for crafting a jigsaw that would have made Agatha Christie smile. It wouldn’t be incorrect to say they don’t make movies like this anymore. Stylishly crafted, cunning in plot, and nubile in its narrative thrust, Game is one of the most aesthetically mounted Hindi films in recent times. Huge efforts and resources have gone into shooting the murder mystery in places where intrigue seems infinite, escape seems undesirable, and redemption appears as distant as the sound of the waves splashing against rocks that have centuries of stories to tell.

Welcome to the Greek island of Samos. Anupam Kher, looking pricey in his tycoon’s avatar invites four of the most distinguished elitist-outlaws on this side of Charles Sobhraj.
See full article at Bollyspice
  • 4/1/2025
  • by Subhash K Jha
  • Bollyspice
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This Day That Year: 2005’s Neeraj Pathak’s Irrfan-Sunny Thriller Right Yaaa Wrong
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Subhash K Jha, in a new feature in his Thus Day That Year series revisits Neeraj Pathak’s Irrfan Khan and Sunny Deol thriller, Right Yaaa Wrong.

Right Yaa Wrong was the surprise shocker of 2010. If you’ve forgotten that jump-out-of-the-seat feeling, then it’s time to nudge it to awake again. Debutant director Neeraj Pathak put together a thriller that’s as much a homage to Alfred Hitchcock and Brian da Palma as our own Abbas-Mustan and Right Yaa Wrong still emerges original and strong.

An intricate jigsaw that always stays a step ahead of the audience, Right Yaaa Wrong makes a penetrating comment on how the country’s legal system can be subverted in a clever hand. More importantly, the taut and briskly-paced script suggests that the yin and yang concepts of right and wrong are not only ambivalent but also interchangeable when the context is right.

Sunny Deol,...
See full article at Bollyspice
  • 3/12/2025
  • by Subhash K Jha
  • Bollyspice
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“Yodha is an entertaining Midair Drama” – A Subhash K Jha Review
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There is something to be said about a film’s pacing when it is relentlessly racing against time. Yodha, as co-directed by Sagar Ambre and Pushkar Ojha (just how do two directors work together is a mystery waiting to be solved) is a wildly improbable but nonetheless insanely entertaining cliffhanger.

This is pulp fiction on celluloid: you know the kind of novels that Alistair McLean and James Hadley Chase wrote in the 1970s, with so many twists and turns that the readers’ heads spun out of control. Which is what the screenplay of Yodha constantly threatens to do. It chases down the most unlikely plotting devises and before we can swallow one, the narrative moves hurriedly to another oh-we-didn’t-see that coming corkscrew twist.

Siddharth Malhotra stands tall at the centre of the gravity-defying plot. He seems convinced about the plausibility of the proceedings and infuses the meticulously designed action...
See full article at Bollyspice
  • 3/15/2024
  • by Subhash K Jha
  • Bollyspice
Christian Petzold on Afire, Subverting the Summer Movie, and Twin Peaks
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It’s February morning in Berlin. “I’m a little out of consciousness,” Christian Petzold explains, a tad frazzled but keen to talk––and Petzold likes to talk. His latest film Afire had premiered the night before and the party had slipped into the wee hours. “There’s Thomas, he was at the party till 6 a.m.,” Petzold explains as his leading man shuffles by, fresh from a round of junkets and looking just a little shellshocked.

That look is one that viewers will soon be familiar with when Afire is released this week. Taking place in a secluded house by the Baltic Sea, it shows Petzold at his most sultry and melodramatic. The drama stars Thomas Schubert as Leon, a writer struggling to follow up on the success of his first novel. He travels with a friend for a summer getaway but becomes infatuated with a woman who shares the house with them.
See full article at The Film Stage
  • 7/11/2023
  • by Rory O'Connor
  • The Film Stage
Eve
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Is Joseph Losey’s elusive, maudit masterpiece really a masterpiece? Stanley Baker’s foolish lout of a writer ruins his life pursuing the wanton Jeanne Moreau, and it’s hard to tell if she’s punishing him or he’s punishing himself. Losey’s directing skills are in top form on location in Venice and Rome for this absorbing art film. Pi’s overdue and very welcome disc sorts out the multiple release versions for the first time, and in so doing finally makes the show critically accessible. Co-starring (swoon) Virna Lisi and James Villiers.

Eve

Region B Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1962 / B&w / 1:85 widescreen / 126 109, 108 min. / Eva, The Devil’s Woman / Street Date October 19, 2020 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £15.99

Starring: Jeanne Moreau, Stanley Baker, Virna Lisi, James Villiers, Riccardo Garrone, Lisa Gastoni, Checco Rissone, Enzo Fiermonte, Nona Medici, Roberto Paoletti, Alexis Revidis, Evi Rigano.

Cinematography: Gianni Di Venanzo, Henri Decaë

Film...
See full article at Trailers from Hell
  • 9/26/2020
  • by Glenn Erickson
  • Trailers from Hell
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
“You crazy rat you croaked him!” Yes, you’ve probably heard better hardboiled dialogue, but this British imitation of American gangster pictures takes the cake for screwy line deliveries. It’s derived from a book and play that’s already derived from a salacious William Faulkner story. Jack La Rue and Linden Travers try to make a kidnapper-rapist into a sympathetic, romantic figure, with marvelously awkward results. This Brit import comes with significant extras.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish

All-Region Blu-ray

Powerhouse Indicator

1948 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 103 min. / / Street Date May 27, 2019 / available from Powerhouse Films UK / £17.00

Starring: Starring: Jack La Rue, Hugh McDermott, Linden Travers, Walter Crisham, MacDonald Parke, Danny Green, Lilli Molnar, Charles Goldner, Zoé Gail, Leslie Bradley, Richard Nielson, Michael Balfour, Frances Marsden, Sydney James.

Cinematography: Gerald Gibbs

Film Editor: Manuel del Campo

Original Music: George Melachrino

From the novel by James Hadley Chase

Written, Produced and Directed by St.
See full article at Trailers from Hell
  • 5/7/2019
  • by Glenn Erickson
  • Trailers from Hell
Perilous Passions in Aldrich’s Neglected “The Grissom Gang” (1971) | Blu-ray Review
And the final nail in the coffin of Aldrich Studios was 1971’s The Grissom Gang, an adaptation of famed UK noir writer James Hadley Chase’s No Orchids for Miss Blandish. The film is an underrated gangster classic, which takes St. John Legh Clowes’ original film and brings it into the sweaty forefront of the New American Cinema style. Strong performances and the heightened psychosexual undertones of the novel’s text makes this a much grittier example of the Lima Syndrome which is at the crux of the film’s narrative.…...
See full article at IONCINEMA.com
  • 1/15/2019
  • by Nicholas Bell
  • IONCINEMA.com
New to Streaming: ‘Disobedience,’ ‘Sweet Country,’ ‘Beyond the Hills,’ and More
With a seemingly endless amount of streaming options — not only the titles at our disposal, but services themselves — we’ve taken it upon ourselves to highlight the titles that have recently hit platforms. Every week, one will be able to see the cream of the crop (or perhaps some simply interesting picks) of streaming titles (new and old) across platforms such as Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, and more (note: U.S. only). Check out our rundown for this week’s selections below.

Beyond the Hills (Cristian Mungiu)

It took Cristian Mungiu over five years to release a feature-length follow-up to his Palme d’Or winning masterpiece, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days. That film, along with The Death of Mr. Lazerescu before it, launched the Romanian New Wave to international acclaim and recognition, and although the movement is not quite as overtly political as it once was, Beyond the Hills is evidence that...
See full article at The Film Stage
  • 7/13/2018
  • by Jordan Raup
  • The Film Stage
Close-Up on Jean-Luc Godard's "The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company"
Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Jean-Luc Godard's The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company (1986), which is receiving an exclusive global online premiere on Mubi, is showing July 13 - August 12, 2018 as a Special Discovery.Alfred Hitchcock may have been the one who famously likened actors to cattle, but leave it to Jean-Luc Godard to actually depict the analogy. Throughout Godard’s Grandeur et décadence d’un petit commerce de cinéma (The Rise and Fall of a Small Film Company), his comic 1986 contribution to the multinational “Série noire” program, the iconoclastic French auteur pokes and prods a roundup of filmmaking measures, from the casting corral and the necessary financial wrangling to the ever-evolving technical wilderness of modern media. Recently born again into the world of narrative filmmaking, Godard began the 1980s with Sauve qui peut (la vie), a release he dubbed his “second first film.
See full article at MUBI
  • 7/12/2018
  • MUBI
Review: "No Orchids For Miss Blandish" (1948); Kino Lorber Blu-ray Edition
Kino Lorber Blu-ray release.

By Nicholas Anez

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When No Orchids for Miss Blandish premiered in London in 1948, it created controversy that extended all the way to British Parliament. The Monthly Film Bulletin called the movie “the most sickening exhibition of brutality, perversion and sex ever shown on a cinema screen.” The Saturday Pictorial called it “a piece of nauseating muck.” The Observer’s reviewer wrote: “This film has all the morals of an alley cat and the sweetness of a sewer.” Some politicians were also offended. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food said that the film “was likely to pervert the minds of the British people.” Eventually, the British Board of Film Censors was compelled to offer an apology for approving the film’s production.

Attempts to release the movie in the United States by distributor Richard Gordon were met with...
See full article at Cinemaretro.com
  • 3/4/2018
  • by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
  • Cinemaretro.com
Berlin Review: Isabelle Huppert Goes Through the Motions in the Preposterous ‘Eva’
Benoit Jacquot’s preposterous erotic thriller is rarely erotic and never thrills. It shouldn’t be at first glance: the film has the ingredients of haute cuisine – Isabelle Huppert, playing a high-end sex worker, is rarely boring and Gaspar Ulliel, with his implausibly chiseled looks, could be a sexy, sophisticated foil – but this is more Royale with Cheese than gourmet fare. It’s one of the most lifeless thrillers I’ve seen in recent years, and, since it doesn’t even have a notable controversy or storytelling quirk that might merit artistic evaluation, a dreadful inclusion in the Berlinale competition program.

You may struggle to name a dull Huppert performance, but as Eva, the great French actor is going through the motions. She plays the titular character, a secretive escort to the rich who finds herself besotted by Ulliel’s Bertrand, who himself has closely-guarded backstory.

As the film opens,...
See full article at The Film Stage
  • 2/25/2018
  • by Ed Frankl
  • The Film Stage
No Orchids for Miss Blandish
Devotees of crime and film noir will get a kick out of this Brit attempt to capture the American style, that now comes off as screamingly funny. It was both a huge hit and a big scandal in London, 1948, where the censors came down hard on the film’s flagrant immorality and over-the-top violence. Former pre-Code second-banana thug Jack La Rue tries hard to be Humphrey Bogart. Leading lady Linden Travers’ role is as non-pc now as it was then: an heiress falls in love with the gangster, who has raped her, because she likes it. But the film’s maladroit hardboiled dialogue is hilarious fun.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1948 / B&W / 1:37 flat Academy / 103 min. / Street Date March 20, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Jack La Rue, Hugh McDermott, Linden Travers, Walter Crisham, MacDonald Parke, Danny Green, Lilli Molnar, Charles Goldner, Zoë Gail, Leslie Bradley, Richard Nielson,...
See full article at Trailers from Hell
  • 2/24/2018
  • by Glenn Erickson
  • Trailers from Hell
Benoît Jacquot in Les adieux à la reine (2012)
‘Eva’ Review: Not Even Isabelle Huppert Playing an Irritated Prostitute Can Save this Limp Melodrama — Berlinale 2018
Benoît Jacquot in Les adieux à la reine (2012)
There was a minor kerfuffle during the Berlinale press conference for Benoît Jacquot’s “Eva” when a journalist asked star Isabelle Huppert how she achieved such a degree of eroticism in the film without getting nude. “You have a very bizarre idea of eroticism,” came the actress’ withering second-degree burn of a reply.

And, to Huppert’s credit, it was a ridiculous question. Ridiculous because French cinema has spent more than a century illustrating that T&A has precious little to do with screen sensuality, ridiculous because Huppert could make a Haneke movie feel erotic, and ridiculous because Jacquot’s overblown melodrama is a film about people who disguise themselves by how they dress.

A limp, sudsy adaptation of James Hadley Chase’s 1945 novel “Eve” (a potboiler that Joseph Losey once spun into a Jeanne Moreau vehicle of the same name), “Eva” begins with an engaging sequence that instantly sets the...
See full article at Indiewire
  • 2/18/2018
  • by David Ehrlich
  • Indiewire
'Eva': Film Review | Berlin 2018
Writer-director Benoit Jacquot’s new movie seems to have all the ingredients needed for a nail-biting, bodice-ripping psycho-sexual French thriller.

It’s based on a juicy potboiler (written by James Hadley Chase) that was first brought to the screen by blacklisted Hollywood filmmaker Joseph Losey (in a 1962 version starring Jeanne Moreau). It has an eerie lakeside setting in the photogenic city of Annecy, situated at the foot of the French Alps. And it has a first-rate cast toplined by Isabelle Huppert, who plays the film’s titular character with a sly, slightly aloof je ne sais quoi abandon.

So why is it...
See full article at The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
  • 2/17/2018
  • by Jordan Mintzer
  • The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
Wes Anderson
10 Must-See Films at the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival
Wes Anderson
As the 2018 Berlin International Film Festival starts this Thursday, the first big European festival of year will unleash almost 400 movies of all shapes and sizes. From high-profile premieres like Wes Anderson’s opening night entry “Isle of Dogs,” to bold offerings from bright European directors like Christian Petzold and Corneliu Porumboiu, and a wide array of work by emerging filmmakers from all over the world, the Berlinale is an incredibly eclectic (and almost overwhelmingly large) cornucopia of new cinema.

Read More: Berlinale Director Dieter Kosslick Will Step Down After 2019 Festival

IndieWire will be on the ground in Germany, bringing you the latest from Potsdamer Platz. Here are the 10 features that we’re most excited to see at this year’s festival.

“Eva” (Benoit Jacquot)

If it’s Huppert, we’re there. No decent European film festival is complete without at least one appearance by Isabelle Huppert, and we’re pleased...
See full article at Indiewire
  • 2/12/2018
  • by David Ehrlich and Eric Kohn
  • Indiewire
Berlin Film Festival 2018: Gus Van Sant, Isabelle Huppert movies in competition
The Berlinale has revealed the first films within its Competition and Berlinale Special lineups.

Source: Amazon

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot

The Berlin Film Festival (15 - 25 Feb) has revealed the first films within its Competition and Berlinale Special lineups.

Directors including Benoit Jacquot, Gus Van Sant, Alexey German Jr., Małgorzata Szumowska, Philip Gröning, Thomas Stuber and Laura Bispuri will compete in this year’s Competition while Isabel Coixet and Lars Kraume feature in the Berlinale Special strand.

Alongside the previously announced opening film, Isle of Dogs by Wes Anderson, seven productions and co-productions from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Serbia, the Russian Federation, and the USA are announced for the Competition.

Gus Van Sant’s drama Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far, which will debut at Sundance, is the only film announced today which is not a world premiere. Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill,...
See full article at Screen Daily Test
  • 12/18/2017
  • by Andreas Wiseman
  • Screen Daily Test
Berlin Film Festival 2018: Gus Van Sant, Isabelle Huppert movies in competition
The Berlinale has revealed the first films within its Competition and Berlinale Special lineups.

Source: Amazon

Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far On Foot

The Berlin Film Festival (15 - 25 Feb) has revealed the first films within its Competition and Berlinale Special lineups.

Directors including Benoit Jacquot, Gus Van Sant, Alexey German Jr., Małgorzata Szumowska, Philip Gröning, Thomas Stuber and Laura Bispuri will compete in this year’s Competition while Isabel Coixet and Lars Kraume feature in the Berlinale Special strand.

Alongside the previously announced opening film, Isle of Dogs by Wes Anderson, seven productions and co-productions from France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Switzerland, Serbia, the Russian Federation, and the USA are announced for the Competition.

Gus Van Sant’s drama Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far, which will debut at Sundance, is the only film announced today which is not a world premiere. Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, Rooney Mara and [link...
See full article at ScreenDaily
  • 12/18/2017
  • by Andreas Wiseman
  • ScreenDaily
Jean-Luc Godard’s Bewitchingly Self-Reflexive Midlife Crisis
Emerging from his politically radical period of low-budget, didactic political commentaries with revolutionary overtones, produced primarily on 16mm or tape for television broadcast, prolific French avant-garde iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard unexpectedly returned to commercial filmmaking with Every Man for Himself, finding reinvention in the age of video — a new formal frontier for the now-middle-aged provocateur. Godard’s star-studded return to more conventional cinemas, featuring Isabelle Huppert, Nathalie Baye, and Jacques Dutronc as Paul Godard (of course), a loathsome filmmaker humiliated by having been reduced to working for a TV studio, though shy of being considered a phenomenon in France or elsewhere, was well-publicized worldwide. Uncharacteristically, the aging filmmaker promoted the film extensively, pensively referring to it as his “second first film,” a somewhat deadpan admission that, to begin again, he had to shed the baggage of his underground period. Through this mainstream amelioration began a self-reflective period of filmmaking, reverse-engineering his formal fascinations — disruptive non-linear editing,...
See full article at The Film Stage
  • 10/18/2017
  • by The Film Stage
  • The Film Stage
NYFF55 Revivals Includes Restored Films By Godard, Hou, Costa, Tarkovsky & More
It’s a given that their Main Slate — the fresh, the recently buzzed-about, the mysterious, the anticipated — will be the New York Film Festival’s primary point of attraction for both media coverage and ticket sales. But while a rather fine lineup is, to these eyes, deserving of such treatment, the festival’s latest Revivals section — i.e. “important works from renowned filmmakers that have been digitally remastered, restored, and preserved with the assistance of generous partners,” per their press release — is in a whole other class, one titanic name after another granted a representation that these particular works have so long lacked.

The list speaks for itself, even (or especially) if you’re more likely to recognize a director than title. Included therein are films by Andrei Tarkovsky (The Sacrifice), Hou Hsiao-hsien (Daughter of the Nile, a personal favorite), Pedro Costa (Casa de Lava; trailer here), Jean-Luc Godard (the rarely seen,...
See full article at The Film Stage
  • 8/21/2017
  • by Nick Newman
  • The Film Stage
Abel Ferrara Ensnares Isabelle Huppert, Nicolas Cage, and Willem Dafoe for ‘Siberia’
Abel Ferrara is hardly the most bankable filmmaker and this project has yet to be financially secured, so let’s just hope extra-hard that the pieces fall together here. From the Italian publication La Stampa comes word that he’s moving ever closer to Siberia, a drama the director had tried (and failed) to launch via Kickstarter last year, with the previously attached Willem Dafoe now joined by the “certainly cast” Isabelle Huppert and Nicolas Cage.

Siberia‘s initial reveal was almost hilariously vague, the crowdfunding campaign labeling this endeavor “a subjective and objective journey into the subconscious” that will use Carl Jung’s Red Book as a launch pad for “[exploring] the language of dreams, myth and the natural world.” The longer synopsis sounded just as peculiar:

“We begin in an outpost far north of Jack London country where Clint holds out with his partner Mitchell, (Willem Dafoe in both roles) serving coffee,...
See full article at The Film Stage
  • 12/19/2016
  • by Nick Newman
  • The Film Stage
Shah Rukh Khan Launches golden Tag Heuer Carrera timepieces in Mumbai
Brand Ambassador Shah Rukh Khan along with Kunal Kohli, Punit Malhotra and Tarun Mansukhani were at the recent Tag Haeur event celebrating ‘The Golden Era of Carrera’ that launched the famed watchmaker’s new collection of golden Tag Heuer Carrera timepieces in Mumbai.

This new Carrera series by Tag Heuer is powered by the supremely accurate Calibre 5 automatic movement. Created for the true connoisseurs of luxury, this collection has options in 18 carat Gold for those who like bling and 18 carat Rose Gold for those who like to keep in subtle. With options of rose gold or gold with steel and leather straps, details are stunning in their sophistication: hand-applied Tag Heuer logo, indexes and date window.

The evening was all about celebrating the Art of Manufacturing and Creation, and given the long withstanding association that Tag Heuer has had with the world of glamour and movies, Indian Film directors who...
See full article at Bollyspice
  • 3/5/2014
  • by Stacey Yount
  • Bollyspice
Patrice Chéreau obituary
Film, opera and stage director known for La Reine Margot and his Ring cycle at Bayreuth in 1976

Unusually for a director, Patrice Chéreau, who has died of lung cancer aged 68, had more or less equally prestigious careers in the theatre, cinema and opera. Although he was internationally known from films such as La Reine Margot (1994) and his groundbreaking production of Richard Wagner's Ring cycle at Bayreuth (1976), he was renowned in his native France mostly for his "must-see" stage productions, especially during his long stints as co-director of the Théâtre National Populaire (1971-77) and the Théâtre des Amandiers (1982-90).

At these two subsidised theatres, in Villeurbanne, near Lyons, and Nanterre, in western Paris, respectively, Chéreau was able to introduce modern plays and bring a freshness to bear on the classics, particularly Marivaux, whose La Dispute he directed to acclaim at the Tnp in three different versions in the 1970s. At the Amandiers,...
See full article at The Guardian - Film News
  • 10/8/2013
  • by Ronald Bergan
  • The Guardian - Film News
French Director Known for His Movies with Adjani and Huppert, and for Several Gay-Related Dramas Has Died
Patrice Chéreau dead at 68: French director best known for ‘Queen Margot,’ gay-related dramas (photo: Patrice Chéreau; Isabelle Adjani in ‘Queen Margot’) Screenwriter, sometime actor, and stage, opera, and film director Patrice Chéreau, whose clinically cool — some might say sterile — films were arthouse favorites in some quarters, has died of lung cancer in Paris. Chéreau was 68. Born on November 2, 1944, in Lézigné, in France’s Maine-et-Loire department, and raised in Paris, Patrice Chéreau began directing plays in his late teens. In the mid-’60s, he became the director of a theater in Sartrouville, northwest of Paris, where he staged plays with a strong left-wing bent. Later on he moved to Milan’s Piccolo Teatro, and in the ’80s became the director of the Théâtre des Amandiers in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre. His 1976 staging of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth was considered revolutionary. Patrice Chéreau...
See full article at Alt Film Guide
  • 10/8/2013
  • by Andre Soares
  • Alt Film Guide
Denys de La Patellière obituary
French film director who attracted big stars and box-office success but was disdained by the Nouvelle Vague

Denys de La Patellière, who has died aged 92, was of the generation of French film directors described with ironic contempt by François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and other critics turned Nouvelle Vague directors as representing le cinéma de papa. But De La Patellière had several huge box-office hits in France in the 1950s and 60s, featuring some of the biggest internationally known French stars of the period such as Lino Ventura, Danielle Darrieux, Michèle Mercier, Pierre Fresnay, Bernard Blier and, above all, Jean Gabin, whom he directed in six films.

"I was a commercial director, which for me is not a pejorative word," De La Patellière recalled. "I never had the ambition to become an auteur, but to make entertaining films that pleased general audiences." In a way, his first film, Les Aristocrates (1955), could...
See full article at The Guardian - Film News
  • 7/30/2013
  • by Ronald Bergan
  • The Guardian - Film News
The Forgotten: The Love Rack
James M. Cain was introduced to the concept of the "love rack" by his friend, screenwriter Vincent Lawrence (Hands Across the Table, Peter Ibbetson). Cain recalled, "I haven't the faintest idea whether this is a rack on which the lovers are tortured, or something with pegs to hold the shining cloak of romance, or how the word figures in it," but he learned from Lawrence that what makes the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet work is the balcony: the obstacle. The thing which separates the lovers and results in their being tormented with desire.

Cain had the idea of making the love story central to his narrative, rather than being "romantic interest," and to use it to tell a tale of murder. "Murder, I said, had always been written from its least interesting angle, which was whether the police catch the murderer." Cain instead wanted to show the development...
See full article at MUBI
  • 7/17/2012
  • MUBI
You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger – review
There are few things I would welcome more than another truly enjoyable movie by Woody Allen, who as writer, director, actor and musician gave me so much pleasure between 1969, when I fell about watching Take the Money and Run, and the early years of this century when he began running out of steam. There were occasional films I didn't care for, but I thought nearly all of them well crafted. Not until Match Point, however, did I find them embarrassing or wholly without merit. There was Scoop (which hasn't been released in the UK) and Cassandra's Dream and Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and I now find myself wishing I were elsewhere when the lights go down. Sadly few film-makers are granted more than a leasehold on their creative talents.

The old Allen is there at the beginning of You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger: the austere white-on-black credits, a...
See full article at The Guardian - Film News
  • 3/20/2011
  • by Philip French
  • The Guardian - Film News
Film review: 'Rough Magic'
Bridget Fonda, John J. Campbell, and Clare Peploe in Miss Shumway jette un sort (1995)
It's not exactly a great mystery to see why Clare Peploe's "Rough Magic" has been floating around in release limbo for the past couple of years.

One of those steeped-in-magic-and-mysticism pictures, this deliberate confusion of screen conventions quickly wears out its overly perky welcome.

Like "Wilder Napalm" and "The Linguini Incident" before it, "Rough Magic" should serve as a handy example of "now you see it, now you don't" at the boxoffice.

Bridget Fonda is Myra Shumway, a magician's assistant in 1950s Los Angeles. She hightails it to Mexico in her shiny Buick convertible when her aspiring politician fiance, Cliff (D.W. Moffett), inadvertently shoots and kills the fatherly illusionist, played by Kenneth Mars.

There she meets up with Doc Ansell (Jim Broadbent), a street huckster who sells Miracle Elixir to the townsfolk; as well as Alex Ross Russell Crowe), a world-weary newspaperman who has been dispatched by Cliff to retrieve a roll of film from Myra that implicates him in the murder.

Of course, Alex ends up falling for the unwitting Myra, but not before she encounters a powerful Mayan sorceress (Euva Anderson), who endows her with the ability to lay giant tarantula eggs, turn annoying men into sausages and bestow on dogs the gift of speech, among other talents.

Peploe, who based her fractured fable on James Hadley Chase's "Miss Shumway Waves a Wand" (with an assist from William Brookfield and Robert Mundy), is obviously a big fan of the novel, but it would have been better left unfilmed. The story's flights of fancy work more effectively on the printed page, where the reader's imagination can take over. On the screen, they're self-consciously precious and grow rapidly tiresome.

The leads are similarly out of kilter. Dressed and coiffed to resemble, say, Veronica Lake and Joseph Cotten, Fonda and Crowe have the looks down but little of the substance or pulp. Old pro Jim Broadbent fares better as the Sydney Greenstreet-esque quack, while funnyman Paul Rodriguez scores some character points as a slimy thug who gets his just deserts.

Visually, the picture hits its requisite marks with some strong period production design from Waldemar Kalinowski and costume design from Richard

Hornung. DP John J. Campbell does some nice things with bright light that help conjure the magical realism.

ROUGH MAGIC

Goldwyn distributed through Metromedia Entertainment Group

UGC Images and Recorded Picture Company

present

in association with Martin Scorsese

A UGC Images production

A Clare Peploe film

Director:Clare Peploe

Producers:Laurie Parker and Declan Baldwin

Screenwriters:Robert Mundy and William Brookfield & Clare Peploe

Based on the novel "Miss Shumway Waves a Wand" by: James Hadley Chase

Executive producers:Yves Attal, Jonathan Taplin, Andrew Karsch

Director of photography:John J. Campbell

Production designer:Waldemar Kalinowski

Editor:Suzanne Fenn

Music:Richard Hartley

Costume designer:Richard Hornung

Color/stereo

Cast:

Myra Shumway:Bridget Fonda

Alex Ross:Russell Crowe

Doc Ansell:Jim Broadbent

Cliff Wyatt:D.W. Moffett

Magician:Kenneth Mars

Diego:Paul Rodriguez

Diego's Wife/Tojola:Euva Anderson

Running time -- 104 minutes

MPAA Rating: PG-13...
  • 5/30/1997
  • The Hollywood Reporter - Movie News
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