The New World: Criterion Collection
July 28, 2016
After completing The Thin Red Line (1998), filmmaker Terrence Malick began working on a film about Che Guevara and his failed revolution in Bolivia (that was eventually made by Steven Soderbergh) but after financing fell through he was offered The New...
Life is Sweet: Criterion Collection
June 10, 2013
For many years, Mike Leigh has been a brilliant and consistent chronicler of the British lower middle working class in cinema. Life is Sweet (1990) was his breakthrough film having cut his teeth previously on plays and television movies where he honed...
The Omen
October 24, 2006
The Omen (2006) is the latest in a long line of 1970s horror films that did not need to be remade but is anyway by an unimaginative major Hollywood studio with a contemporary spin. Priests in the Vatican arrange a powwow with the Pope to inform him that...
Basic Instinct: Unrated Extended Cut
July 21, 2006
After the success of Basic Instinct (1992), the notion of a sequel was quickly proposed but it wasn’t going to be that easy as the project languished in development hell for many years with several screenwriters and directors being attached and then...
Kingdom of Heaven: Director’s Cut
May 23, 2006
Kingdom of Heaven (2005) was Ridley Scott’s costly epic about the Crusades that promptly flopped at the box office in North America. Clearly, the studio and Scott were hoping for another zeitgeist galvanizing response to this film like with Gladiator...
Naked
February 13, 2006
It has been said that there is a fine line between genius and madness and this is certainly epitomized by the protagonist of Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993), a scathing, uncompromising portrait of an angry young man. Does genius preclude or cause madness?...
Kingdom of Heaven
January 13, 2006
There’s a moment in Kingdom of Heaven where our hero Balian asks his enemy Saladin what the city of Jerusalem is worth to him. “Nothing,” he replies. “Everything.” This paradox is the prevailing problem with the film itself;...
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
June 14, 2005
At first, it seems like rather an odd choice picking the director of the racy, coming-of-age road movie, Y tu mamá también (2001), to direct the latest Harry Potter movie, The Prisoner of Azkaban (2004). Studios are notoriously protective of their cash...
