Category: Articles
A look back at the moving image: From Silence to CGI
There is no doubt that this is the era of the moving image. Since the 1860s, with the invention of the zoetrope, an unstoppable wave of innovation has taken this infant technology and built it into the definitive mode of communication for the twenty-first century. Now we are increasingly unlikely to go a single day…
Oliver Reed: A moment to remember
“Richard Burton was hitting the bottle with Jimmy Hurt the night before his death. He knew it was going to kill him, but he did not stop. I don’t have a drink problem. But if that was the case and doctors told me I would have to stop, I’d like to think I would be…
I believe in cinema
I believe in cinema. I believe in the almost infinite potential for cinema to detail, comment upon and engage with the human condition. I believe that cinema at its highest and lowest is perhaps the most revealing cultural artefact of all. I love the fact that, through a nation’s cinematic output at any given period,…
A bizarre and mediocre ode to Stanley Kubrick
What could I possibly write about Kubrick that hasn’t been written before? Today at least… absolutely nothing. And so, in the interests of filling a blank page with some kind of Kubrick-esque blog, here is a series of hurriedly composed haikus, chronologically ordered, on the films of Stanley Kubrick. Flying Padre: An RKO-Pathe Screenliner…
Will Ferrell & Adam McKay: Comedic Genius
Comedy is a challenging form. For every hundred attempts made at producing something that might be considered funny to a commercially significant audience, only a dozen might be lucky/good enough to succeed. Of those that do succeed, only a minuscule number prove to be worthy enough to produce laughs more than a few years on.…