Gene Hackman had an acting career spanning the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Winner of two Academy awards, over his career he had many other awards and nominations. I consider Hackman’s performances to be grounded and real, so in memory of a great actor, here are some of my favourite…
We’ve all heard of the so-called B movie, the low budget films, churned out at speed by studios, usually with pretty terrible plots and casts. Often that is quite true. Sometimes, however, these second-class films can produce something impressive, such as a selection of movies produced in the forties for RKO studios by Val Lewton.…
There are a lot of debates about the definition of science fiction. There are many different opinions on good and bad movies, and a million ‘best of’ list articles on the internet. I won’t presume to call this a list of best films. This will be a list of science fiction films I have seen…
When I was a kid I loved fairy-tales, fantasy, myths and legends. Movies that told fantastical adventures were watched and re-watched, and I was especially enthralled with the monsters and other fantastical creatures that appeared. I loved any stories which included magic and fantasy. A lot of these old movies would be shown on tv…
This film was released in 1950, and directed by the great Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Ostensibly a murder mystery, it relates the tale of a samurai who has been found dead, his wife raped, and the enquiry into how this happened. The whole story is told in flashback. The framing device is that of three…
‘Onibaba’ was released in 1964, and is a black and white Japanese film directed by Kaneto Shindo. It’s often billed as horror, and it is certainly horrific, but not in the way you might expect. In fourteenth century Japan, during a time of civil war, two peasant women (Nobuko Otowa and Jitsuko Yoshimura), struggle to…
Take cold war fears of nuclear annihilation, and add in an intelligent super-computer gone amuk, and you have ”Colossus: The Forbin Project”. This was certainly not the first time a computer taking over had been depicted on film – both “2001 A Space Odyssey” and “Alphaville” predate this, for example. The idea also appeared in…
The Dutch actor Rutger Hauer passed away this week, and he was a personal favourite of mine, having appeared in some films and television that I have quite enjoyed over the years, including a few that were favourites of mine during my teen years. So as a tribute to a talented actor who I have…
Eclectic Assemblage 