Substance abuse
The Substance is another film about the corrosive effects of the media on women’s lives, but Sweat (2020) was shorter and better.
Mad about Glynis
The key footnote of last week’s news for film lovers was the death, at the grand age of 100, of Glynis Johns, daughter of Welsh actor, Mervyn. Despite being possessed of palpable charm and intelligence…
Cover your ears!
In a singularly inspired touch, whether Scott’s, Scarpa’s or Phoenix’s, the cinema’s latest in a distinguished line of screen Napoleons has the artillery officer (that he was) repeatedly cover his ears before every salvo
Sophia Capasso shorts
I had the pleasure the other weekend of taking coffee with local actress-turned filmmaker, Sophia Capasso
Charon’s obol
I was recently granted the privilege of previewing a new British independent entitled Ferryman.
DAC’s Top Ten
Following on from the Sight&Sound critics’ poll, held every ten years, here is my up to date list of personal best, for which I have tried not to base on my 2012 list…
Truffaut: l’homme qui aimait les films
With the anniversary of Truffaut’s untimely death coming up next week, and Godard’s still recent news, I thought I would devote some inches to the director I have always preferred of the two.
Un comédien très discret
Et Dieu enleva… Jean-Louis Trintignant last Friday, the 91 year-old actor of over 120 films, and perhaps the greatest French actor of the post-war period. Actually, scratch ‘perhaps’. The Nouvelle Vague created many female stars … but fewer male ones.
We have lift off!
One year after launching Cinefile Reviews in Squarespace form, I have sourced over 5,000 images and written 2,000 new entries (that’s 2,000 synopses and 2,000 thumbnail crits)! There are now over 7,300 completed entries, I can sit back and exhale, open the Brut and afford myself a smidgeon of satisfaction…
Cro Magnon Woman
At the halfway point of Claude Chabrol’s Le boucher, Mademoiselle Hélène takes her pupils on a visit to the Périgord caves nearby, not Lascaux but something similar. She explains about Cro Magnon man…
Cinefile turns a page
This is it. Cinefile 3.0 has arrived. Having gone from Excel spreadsheet to a WordPress website in 2012, the database has been prey to no end of bugs and missed updates, but no more!
Tenet: the end you see coming
Christopher Nolan's new one-word movie, chosen both for its palindromic embodiment of the central conceit, and the convenient fact that it doesn't mean very much…
Scopophiliac
Recently caught Henri-Georges Clouzot's last film, the misleadingly titled, and even more so in its English language title, La prisonniere. Nothing in his oeuvre hitherto quite prepares you for it…
Tarantino's Eight and a Half
In the film’s motivating scene, Pacino’s bar owner cum no.1 fan warns DiCaprio’s TV star that the writing is on the wall of his career…
7,000 and counting
Having been born in the same year in which Help! was made, I consider it fitting enough to claim Ron Howard's exemplary Beatles documentary as my 7,000th film …
Tarred and horse feathered?
Six days in the lives of this pair who barely speak to one another, and it took me nearly as long to finish the film. This is not to say that The Turin Horse is a hard slog not worth the bother; far from it…
Mal de vivre
Have recently seen two films (Young Adult and A Quiet Passion - see links for a fuller individual appreciation) which, in their different ways, ruminate over the lot of their ageing female characters …