Bluebeard’s Castle, or The Horror Chambers of Doctor Powell
Senses of Cinema
by David Melville
6d ago
There is gore on everything; opera is synonymous with bloodshed and erotic violence. – Peter Conrad1 In the beginning was the Word – and the Word was the Director. The cinema of Michael Powell is a world shaped and ruled by the absolute and overriding power of the director’s eye. In his 1986 memoir A ..read more
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Seeing Colours: The Thief of Bagdad (1940)
Senses of Cinema
by Alex Williams
6d ago
The Archers thought in colour from The Thief of Bagdad onwards.1 When British producer Alexander Korda set out to remake Raoul Walsh’s silent epic The Thief of Bagdad (1924), his intention was not fidelity to the original. Itself a free adaptation of the One Thousand and One Nights folk tales, Walsh’s film truly cemented star ..read more
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Our Time Will Come
Senses of Cinema
by Seán Cubitt
3w ago
Winner of Best Film and Best Director at the 37th Hong Kong Film Awards, Ming yue ji shi you (Our Time Will Come, 2017) is the 29th film directed by Ann Hui, a leading figure in the Hong Kong New Wave cinema of the 1980s. Set during the Japanese occupation, its release coincided with the ..read more
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Boat People
Senses of Cinema
by Andrew Le
3w ago
Following the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, many people endeavoured to escape the country, with the main method available being by boat. It is estimated that on top of the 800,000 people that safely arrived in another country, a large number of refugees, almost as many as those who survived, did not. Admittedly ..read more
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The Secret
Senses of Cinema
by Faith Everard
3w ago
It’s strange to witness a film so visually bewitching and yet so narratively disorganised. Fūng gip (The Secret, Ann Hui, 1979) is such a film: completely beautiful, dark, and unsettling, yet at times incoherent. The Secret is loosely based on a grisly real-life murder, the ‘Double Corpse Murder Case’ which took place in 1970 at ..read more
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Yackety Yack, Don’t Talk Back
Senses of Cinema
by Adrian Danks
1M ago
Shot in late 1972 and released at the Melbourne Filmmakers Co-op in mid-September 1974,1 Dave Jones’ Yackety Yack is one of the key films made in that transitional period between the relative “void” of homegrown Australian feature-film production in the 1950s and 1960s and the “renaissance” that gathered steam in the mid-1970s. It opened to ..read more
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Queensland
Senses of Cinema
by Digby Houghton
1M ago
It is July and Richmond are teetering on a spot in the top eight in the Australian Football League (AFL), a sport that is akin to a religion in Melbourne. It’s an average high of 13 degrees and the chilly southerly wind whips my face every time I venture outdoors. In a city like Melbourne ..read more
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A Splash of Light in the Darkness: Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire
Senses of Cinema
by Wheeler Winston Dixon
2M ago
Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), often classified as a film noir, and one of the first Hollywood films dealing with antisemitism, didn’t start out with that theme in mind. Instead, the film was based on Richard Brooks’ 1945 novel The Brick Foxhole and Brooks, then serving in the Marine Corps, made anti-gay prejudice – and the ..read more
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“I Know a Way…”: Sudden Fear
Senses of Cinema
by Ian Olney
2M ago
Hollywood never knew what to do with Gloria Grahame. When Grahame’s movie career stalled in the early 1960s, she had only been in the business for fifteen years. In that short time, she had appeared in a string of box office hits, including The Greatest Show on Earth (Cecil B DeMille, 1952), The Bad and ..read more
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Tribute to a Tyrant: The Bad and the Beautiful
Senses of Cinema
by Grace Boschetti
2M ago
When Gloria Grahame won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her sub-ten-minute performance in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), presenter Edmund Gwenn made a playful quip about the melodrama’s F. Scott Fitzgerald–inspired title: “I’m the bad; here comes the beautiful!”1 In fact, this choice of title had been rather contentious ..read more
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