Recent Posts
European Cinema of the 1960s and 1970s: 43 Films to Watch, From Truffaut and Melville to Fellini and Bergman
Twenty years. That’s roughly the window between Truffaut’s first feature and Buñuel’s last, and European cinema has never been this good, this varied or this sure of itself since. The French New Wave tore up the studio rulebook, Jean-Pierre Melville turned the gangster film into something close to ritual, and the Italians, Swedes, Germans and Spaniards each found their own way to make pictures nobody in Hollywood would have dared to.
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Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Book vs 1979 Series vs 2011 Film, and Why the Long Version Wins
John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy came out in 1974 and has been adapted twice. Once in 1979 as a seven-part BBC series with Alec Guinness as George Smiley. Once in 2011 as a film directed by Tomas Alfredson, with Gary Oldman in the role. Both are good. One of them understands the book.
The story is simple to state and hard to tell. There’s a Soviet mole at the top of British intelligence, the Circus.
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Giallo Began with Yellow Crime Books and Became a Style of Italian Film
A yellow book cover gave Italian crime fiction a name. Later, that same word travelled into film culture and acquired a narrower, more unsettling meaning for audiences outside Italy. The journey from a publisher’s shelf to a darkened cinema is a good story in itself, and it tells us something about the slippery way genres grow.
In 1929 Mondadori launched a line of detective novels in distinctive yellow covers. The early list brought translated crime fiction to Italian readers, including S.
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High and Low vs Animals: Two Kidnapping Thrillers With Opposite Moral Conclusions
More than six decades separate Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963) and Ben Affleck’s Animals (2026), yet both begin with the same terrible predicament. A wealthy man learns that his son has been kidnapped and that the ransom threatens everything he has built. Then comes the reversal: the kidnappers have taken the wrong child. His own son is safe. A poorer family’s child is in danger, and saving him will come at a tremendous personal cost.
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Jeffrey Archer Dies at 86: A Tribute to Britain's Great Storyteller
Jeffrey Archer died last night at 86. He sold more than 300 million books, and he never once pretended to be anything other than what he was: a man who wanted you to turn the page.
That sounds like a small ambition. It isn’t. Plenty of literary novelists have spent careers trying to hold a reader the way Archer held millions of them on trains, on beaches, in hospital waiting rooms.
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East of Eden on Netflix: Good and Bad Are Transient States for Steinbeck's Characters
Netflix put all seven episodes of East of Eden online on October 1. Zoe Kazan adapted it, which closes a family loop of sorts: her grandfather Elia Kazan directed the 1955 film with James Dean, and that film used only the last stretch of Steinbeck’s novel. Lee doesn’t appear in it at all.
The series takes the whole thing, from 1862 to 1918. Tracy Letts plays Cyrus Trask, with Christopher Abbott and Mike Faist as his sons, Adam and Charles.
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No News From God at 25: Díaz Yanes' Heaven and Hell Comedy Still Lands
Heaven has a numbers problem. Hardly anyone passes the entrance exam any more, intake has dried up, and management is close to writing the whole century off. Hell has the opposite trouble, which is overcrowding. Then a woman on Earth prays for her son, a boxer with a bad past and a head injury that could kill him, and both head offices scramble a field agent to go get him.
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Beauty in Black Is a Racist Show, and Tyler Perry Being Black Doesn't Change That
I don’t like this argument when other people make it. The claim that a book or a film degrades the race, that it hands ammunition to the other side, that it should have been made differently for the good of the group, has an ugly record. It was used against Richard Wright for writing Bigger Thomas, and against Zora Neale Hurston for not writing him, by critics equally sure of themselves.
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Pascali's Island: Barry Unsworth's Novel and the 1988 Ben Kingsley Film Are Both Excellent
My copy is the Penguin film tie-in, secondhand, cover soft at the corners, Ben Kingsley’s face floating over a block of hot orange. Usually a tie-in edition is a warning sign. It means the book is being sold on the back of a film, and the film is generally the reason nobody bothers with the book afterwards. This one is the exception. The novel is very good and the film is very good, and they are good in different enough ways that neither spoils the other.
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Samurai Films Like 13 Assassins: Why 11 Rebels Is the One That Works
Ask for “a recent samurai movie like 13 Assassins” and you’ll get a pile of recommendations that share a costume and nothing else. Everyone points you at the streaming series. Most of them miss.
The problem is that the request is usually about structure, not setting. What people remember from Miike’s film isn’t the swords. It’s the assembly. Somebody decides a man has to die, somebody else goes around collecting the people who will do it, and then those people walk into a village they know they won’t walk out of.
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