David Cronenberg is one of those directors whom I find perennially interesting, yet I find it hard to love most of his films. My favourites of his are The Dead Zone and Videodrome, with The Fly and A History Of Violence not far behind. Scanners pre-dates all of those, but shares his icy Canadian sensibility,…
M*A*S*H
I have a hard time remembering Robert Altman’s 1970 movie M*A*S*H as the subsequent very long-running TV series sticks in my memory more powerfully. I do remember seeing the movie after the TV show had been around for years, and I had difficulty adjusting to its much harder edge, and Altman’s signature episodic style. Donald…
The Conversation
“He’d kill US if he had the chance….” This I remember was the pivotal line in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 paranoid procedural thriller The Conversation. Inspired by Antonioni’s earlier arthouse thriller Blowup, Coppola cast Gene Hackman as a lonely, obsessive bugging expert, whose recordings indicate a potential murder. But it’s when he plays the tape…
Pennies From Heaven
This is a French version of the poster, with great artwork by the prolific American artist Bob Peak. I must admit, I’ve never seen the Americanised movie version, starring Steve Martin. Pennies From Heaven started life as a BBC series, written by the provocative British playwright Dennis Potter, and was an early lead role that…
The Right Stuff
I remember I saw The Right Stuff on a late night press screening while reviewing movies for my university magazine, and I found it hugely impressive. Writer/director Philip Kaufman does a fine job weaving a coherent narrative out of the true story of early NASA test pilots leading up to John Glenn being the first…