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Murder By Decree (4Kuhd) (4K Uhd) From Bob Clark, the acclaimed director of Dead of Night, Black Christmas, Breaking Point, Porky’s and A Christmas Story, comes this horrifying murder-mystery which pits legendary detective Sherlock Holmes against the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper! When Scotland Yard is unable to stop the gruesome rampage of Jack the Ripper, a citizens’ committee asks Sherlock Holmes and his trusted associate Dr. John H. Watson to investigate. Now the brilliant pair must follow a terrifying trail of clues that includes a frightened psychic, a suspicious inspector (David ... Read more...

Critics compare this sophisticated spy thriller to Carol Reed’s earlier Triumph set in Vienna with Joseph Cotten and Orson Welles — but it’s a different story altogether, not about black-market evil but the perils of moral compromise in a divided Berlin. James Mason and Claire Bloom are stunningly good together, in a moody suspense that’s completely serious — no comic relief or ‘fun’ jeopardy to distract from the fascinating, you-are-there setting, a Berlin trying to rebuild itself. With Hildegard Knef, and an extended, beautifully filmed nighttime chase that seals an unlikely romance.

The Man Between

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1953 / B&w / 1:37 flat Academy / 102 min. / Street Date November 5, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: James Mason, Claire Bloom, Hildegard Knef, Geoffrey Toone, Aribert Wäscher, Ernst Schróder, Dieter Krause, Hilde Sessak, Karl John, Ljuba Welitsch, Reinhard Kolldehoff.

Cinematography: Desmond Dickinson

Film Editor: Bert Bates

Original Music: John Addison

Written by Harry Kurnitz,...

Exclusive: The writers’ room for the secretive second season of The Night Manager is complete and it’s more gender balanced than it first appeared.

I understand that Humans and Black Mirror writer Namsi Khan and The Man In The High Castle writer Francesca Gardiner are joining British spy author Charles Cumming and up-and-coming British writer Matthew Orton in the room for the sophomore run of the BBC and AMC thriller.

Although the show has yet to be officially recommissioned, and there’s plenty of rumors as to what shape it will take and which stars will return, I hear that the foursome are in full swing, working on plots for the “slowly developing” drama.

Khan and Gardiner are both rising writers out of the UK. Khan recently wrote an episode of the third season of AMC and Channel sci-fi drama Humans and was part of the writers’ room for...

The secretive second season of The Night Manager is coming together after British spy author Charles Cumming revealed that he was part of the writing team.

Cumming is the second name to emerge for the mysterious group of scribes after Deadline revealed in November that up-and-coming British writer Matthew Orton is on board to pen The Ink Factory-produced second season of the John Le Carré spy thriller.

Orton and Cumming are understood to make up two of the four writers that are working on the series, which has not been officially picked up by British public broadcaster BBC One or U.S. cable network AMC. In fact, The Ink Factory are being increasingly coy about the show’s return, although as one source close to the company remarked, given that it’s a spy drama, it’s no surprise it’s under wraps.

Complicating matters is the fact that Le...

Author: Competitions

The perfect companion piece to Carol Reed’s The Third Man, post-war spy thriller The Man Between comes to Blu-Ray for the first time, DVD and VOD on 2 January, boasting brand new extra features. To celebrate, we have 3 copies of the film on Blu-Ray to give some lucky winners courtesy of Studiocanal.

Set against the backdrop of a haunted, newly divided Berlin, Ivo Kern (James Mason: 5 Fingers, Spring & Port Wine, Cross of Iron) – a troubled former lawyer now working the Black Market – gets caught up in a cat and mouse chase with potentially tragic consequences as he attempts to free a young British lady (Claire Bloom: Richard III, Look Back in Anger, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold) who has been kidnapped in a case of mistaken identity. Starring British screen icons James Mason and Claire Bloom Cbe alongside German sweetheart Hildegarde Neff,...

She was given her big break by Charlie Chaplin and worked with Richard Burton and Laurence Olivier. Claire Bloom talks about her rise to fame and reading her ex-husband Philip Roth’s work

‘Terror! Vice! Violence!” howls the poster for Claire Bloom’s 1953 film The Man Between, co-starring James Mason as Ivo Kern, shadowy smuggler of secrets and people in postwar Berlin. In the poster, he is putting the moves on Bloom, whom the artist has depicted reclining in rumpled sheets, hair down, thighs bared.

“It is fairly misleading!” says Bloom when I show her the poster she’s never seen before during lunch at Blakes hotel in Kensington. She’s right. Carol Reed’s follow-up to The Third Man is an existential meditation on human corruption. One that is being revived for a new audience.

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Hassan Ammar/AP

The man between the sticks is often one of the most important men on the pitch. He can be the difference between a 1-0 win and a 1-4 hammering purely by the level of his performance.

Goalkeeping is a cruel, lonely position. A single mistake almost always results in a goal, placing the prospects of the 10 men in front of him firmly into his gloves. Those who take up the mantle of being a goalkeeper must have broad shoulders as well as talent. Otherwise the results can, and often are, catastrophic.

Stephen Bywater, Massimo Taibi and Kostas Chalkias are all great examples of what happens when a goalkeeper just doesn’t have what it takes to cut it at the top level. Sometimes, though, you come across a starlet who can. Sometimes you get your hands on a Courtois; Dea Gea or a ter Stegen. But where...

Director John Frankenheimer.

I'm often asked which, out of the over 600 interviews I've logged with Hollywood's finest, is my favorite. It's not a tough answer: John Frankenheimer.

We instantly clicked the day we met at his home in Benedict Canyon, and spent most of the afternoon talking in his den. A friendship of sorts developed over the years, with visits to his office for screenings of the old Kinescopes he directed for shows like "Playhouse 90" during his salad days in live television during the 1950s.

We hadn't spoken for nearly a year in mid-2002 when the phone rang. It was John, who spoke in what can only be described as a "stentorian bark," like a general. "Alex!" he exclaimed. "John Frankenheimer." He could sense something was amiss with me. It was. My screenwriting career had stalled. My marriage was progressing to divorce. I had hit bottom. John knew that...

"What a pity that one ever has to come out of doors. Inside, with the curtains closed, it's possible to forget the present, turn your back to the future and face the past with hope and confidence."

The familiar post-war Berlin ruins—hollowed-out buildings like melting fudge dripping up into the sky. But what makes the shot is the tiny foreground pair, man and boy, setting off the desolation with a spark of humanity. Life goes on, but interrupted: for the man walks very slowly, a grandfather not a father. There's a whole missing generation in between.

A shot like this displays the artistry of Carol Reed in a film that's not quite able to contain it. The Man Between (1952) is all too self-consciously an attempt to re-bottle the lightning of Odd Man Out and The Third Man, the first of a series of attempts in this line: Our Man in Havana...

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, it appears as though the Tiff Cinematheque is set to pull out all the stops.

According to Criterion, the Tiff, formerly known as the Cinematheque Ontario, will be bringing out a rather superb and cartoonishly awesome summer schedule, that will include films ranging from Kurosawa pieces, to films from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other films include a month long series dedicated to James Mason, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a tribute to Robin Wood, and most interesting, a retrospective on the works of one Catherine Breillat.

Personally, while the Kurosawa, Pasolini, and Rohmer collections sound amazing, the Breillat series is ultimately the collective that I am most interested in. Ranging from films like the brilliant Fat Girl, to the superb and underrated Anatomy of Hell, these are some of the most interesting and under seen pieces of cinema of recent memory, and are more than...