Prohibitive production costs and an inability to secure therights to The Lord of the Rings turned an early attempt by John Boorman at bringing Tolkien’s masterwork to the screen into another of the director’s dream projects. That project was 1981’s Excalibur, the most unashamedly romantic, mythic ...

Picked up these ones during the last month.

Gollancz have re-released the two Lyonesse books yet again with new covers, so I picked these up as soon as I saw them at White Dwarf Books, probably my fa...

I think Johnnie To is perhaps Hong Kong's best director of action and gangster films since John Woo. His films receive all kinds of awards and regularly screen at festivals such as Cannes, Toronto and Berlin. Though they may tread similar territory, there are distinct differences between the two directors: Woo forged a stylistic trademark out of his bullet-ballet ac...

Ah, Casablanca. The little movie that could. It's one of those 'classics' everyone talks about that you force yourself to watch as part of your education in film, never expecting it to be nearly as good as everyone says, let along to be any fun. Yet that was exactly my experience when I saw the film for the first ...

There were a lot of noirs in contention for a place on my list. The Big Sleep, Criss Cross, The Big Heat, The Killers - all do one or two aspects of the genre exceptionally well and any would have been worthy of inclusion. But none of them are nearly as well-rounded a film as Double Ind...

Alfred Hitchcock is one of my favourite directors, so it was inevitable that at least one of films would appear on my list. While his many technical achievements are readily apparent, for me it?s his consistently tight narratives, stripped of anything extraneous, that I really admire. It al...

This beautiful film is the third in legendary Japanese director Yôji Yamada's magnificent Samurai Trilogy. Apart from taking place during the end of the Edo period (essentially the end of Japan's feudal system), there is nothing linking these films apart from some shared themes, and they can be watched...

It's hard to stand out in the overcrowded World War II movie genre. The period is so full of incredible stories of courage, hope and survival that they've unfortunately started to blur into each other. At least for me, anyway. Downfall, however, is a true stand out. If you have any kind of interest ...

Love him or hate him, Terry Gilliam is a true maverick. Perhaps it wasn't so readily apparent during his time with Monty Python because his anarchic approach fit that format so perfectly, but by the time he got around to the likes of Time Bandits, that distinctive Gilliam style was readily apparent. It's i...