Miles Fielder

The Girlfriend Experience

4 Dec 2009

(15) 77min Steven Soderbergh returns to his roots with more sex and lies on tape (now disc) in this low-budget drama about a high-class hooker in New York who offers her clients the titular relationship facsimile. Hard-core porn star Sasha Grey plays…

Gangster Story

4 Dec 2009

(PG) 65min (Brightspark) Walter Matthau had a handful of supporting roles under his belt (Bigger Than Life, A Face in the Crowd, King Creole) when he directed himself in this 1959 low-budget crime movie. But Matthau had yet to develop his trademark…

Joe Gores - Spade and Archer

4 Dec 2009

It’s a tall order writing a prequel to one of the greatest American hardboiled crime novels. But if anyone was going to pull off a forerunner to Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon it was Joe Gores, like his predecessor, a war veteran, former private…

Scared to Death

4 Dec 2009

(U) 65min (Network) This B-movie chiller from 1947 is chiefly distinguished for being the only colour film to star Bela Lugosi (he appeared but did not star in the 1930 Technicolor film Viennese Nights). Lugosi was long into his poverty row years at…

Where The Wild Things Are - Spike Jonze interview

2 Dec 2009

Plagued by creative and corporate problems and criticised for being too scary for kids, the long-awaited film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are finally sees its UK release this month. Miles Fielder talks to director Spike Jonze about the often…

The Millionairess

13 Nov 2009

(U) 87min (Windows Media) In this still very enjoyable 1960 comedy it;s ironic that Peter Sellers plays a humble Indian doctor who spurns the advances of Sophia Loren's richest woman in the world, given the then married Sellers was head-over-heels…

Gambit

13 Nov 2009

(U) 109min (Second Sight) Hot off the back of Alfie and The Ipcress File, Michael Caine made his Hollywood debut with this cleverly conceived 1966 crime caper. In it, Caine’s cat burglar hires Shirley MacLaine’s Eurasian beauty to help him relieve…

The Film Noir Collection

10 Nov 2009

(12) 375min (BFI DVD retail) Having come to America in 1936 to direct his first love, theatre, on Broadway, Otto Preminger became one of Hollywood’s top filmmakers following the success of his 1944 film noir, Laura. Although the notoriously…

IP Man

4 Nov 2009

(15) 106min (Showboat Blu-ray/DVD retail/rental) Wilson Yip’s historically revisionist action film takes martial arts back to basics with the story of the titular grand master of the ‘wing chun’ fighting style and mentor of screen legend Bruce Lee.

Attica Locke - Black Water Rising

30 Oct 2009

(Serpent’s Tail) It’s perhaps unsurprising that the most vivid thing about Attica Locke’s vibrant debut novel is its key protagonist. Her former black civil rights activist turned ambulance-chasing attorney, Jay Porter, is partly based on the…

Cold Souls

30 Oct 2009

(12A) 101min It’s not surprising that this deadpan existential comedy has been compared, favourably, to Being John Malkovich. Aside from boasting a similarly mind-bending premise (here revolving around the storage, sale and swapping of people’s…

Colin

No-budget Welsh zombie horror

22 Oct 2009

(18) 97min Young Welsh horror movie fan Marc Price apparently made this zombie flick for just £45 – the cost of keeping his crewmates in tea and biscuits for the 18 months of weekend filming plus a few buckets of red food dye. If true, that makes…

Profile: Donnie Yen

The martial arts expert on playing Bruce Lee's mentor

16 Oct 2009

Name Donnie Yen Born 27 July 1963, Canton, China Background Born to a newspaper editor and a martial arts master, Yen began practising tai chi and wushu at the age of four. At 16 he was sent to the Beijing Wushu Academy, where he studied under…

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Inspired take on the Dahl classic

16 Oct 2009

Wes Anderson’s animated adaptation of Roald Dahl’s much loved book is no straightforward children’s film. Wee ones might enjoy it to a degree, but they won’t get much of the typically arch humour and wanton eccentricities the filmmaker once again…

The Holly and the Ivy

50s British melodrama

5 Oct 2009

Although it’s by no means a classic, this British melodrama from 1952 provides an interesting snapshot of domestic life in postwar Blighty. Taking place over Christmas in rural Norfolk, it revolves around a family gathering at the vicarage of the…

Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee

Shane Meadows mock-doc

2 Oct 2009

After the relative extravagance of his 80s-set skinhead film This is England, Shane Meadows returns to his roots with this mock-rockumentary road movie made in the spirit of the low-fi, no-budget shorts with which the Midlands-born filmmaker began his…

I Sell the Dead

The horror comedy comes to DVD

2 Oct 2009

First-time writer-director Glenn McQuaid does a pretty good job of invoking the spirit of the camp old Hammer chillers films with this low-budget comedy horror about a pair luckless bodysnatchers. Set in a mist-shrouded backwater of 19th century feckin…

Pontypool

Bruce MacDonald speaks about his new zombie flick

1 Oct 2009

Just when you thought cinema had done zombies to death a film with a radical new approach comes along to reanimate the living dead. In the Canadian chiller Pontypool a mysterious infection turns the inhabitants of a small town into incoherently babbling…

The Second Wind

French thriller

1 Oct 2009

This is the second adaptation of criminal-turned-crime-writer José Giovanni’s novel about an old lag breaking out of prison after a lengthy spell inside only to find the underworld of late 1950s Paris has changed beyond recognition. The first, made by…

White Lightnin'

17 Sep 2009

Some films come out of nowhere, knock you for six and leave you dazed and elated and wondering where the hell that came from. White Lightnin’ is one such film. It starts as a biopic based on the life of 1970s Appalachian mountain dancer Jesco White…

White Lightnin' or just white trash?

The creators of the controversial revenge tale explain all

17 Sep 2009

Watching White Lightnin’ you wonder where its makers came up with the idea for their gloriously demented film. At once a biopic about a hillbilly dancer and a tale of revenge that plays like a seventies American horror movie, it’s the story of Jesco…

Eddie Campbell

The comic artist/writer brings his life's work together

17 Sep 2009

Glasgow-born, Brisbane-based Eddie Campbell is best known for illustrating From Hell, his and writer Alan Moore’s exhaustive graphic novel investigation of the Jack the Ripper murders. It’s the Oz-based ex-pat’s autobiographical comics, however, that…

Rider on the Rain

16 Sep 2009

(15) 120min (Optimum) Between appearing in supporting roles in all-star Hollywood romps such as The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen throughout the sixties and establishing himself as a star in his own right in brutal thrillers such as The…

The Big Knife

16 Sep 2009

(PG) 107min (Optimum) Movies about Hollywood don’t get more caustic than this. Released in 1955, the year after the final death knell of the studio system, it’s a searing indictment of old Tinseltown made in the style of a film noir. Directed by the…

The Red Baron

16 Sep 2009

(12) 101min (Showboat) The daredevil adventures of the famous First World War flying ace ought to make for an entertaining cinematic romp. Manfred von Richthofen, the young, handsome, aristocrat who terrorised the Allies in his scarlet bi-plane…