I thought Timothy Dalton was terrific as the new James Bond in The Living Daylights. In fact, I found the whole movie something of a breath of fresh air after the ludicrousness of the latter Roger Moore Bonds, where pretty much everything ended up being played for cheap laughs. In the movie’s gripping opening sequence…
The Red Shoes / Tales Of Hoffmann
Here are a pair of very rare posters for Powell/Pressburger classics. This directing/producing team produced many beloved British movies in the 40s/50s, including A Matter Of Life And Death and Black Narcissus. Now, I first have to admit that I have seen neither The Red Shoes nor Tales Of Hoffmann, movies set in the worlds of…
Kill Bill
Kill Bill is my joint favourite Quentin Tarantino movie, along with Pulp Fiction. Tarantino movies tend to veer between breathlessly exhilarating and sluggishly unwatchable. His tendency to deliberately drag scenes and dialogue out to breaking point reached its nadir for me with The Hateful Eight which I, well, hated. Kill Bill Volume 2 was a…
The Thing
John Carpenter’s The Thing is one of those movies whose reputation has grown over the years. It got some stinky reviews when it came out and under-performed at the time, but it has since been reappraised and had a second life on DVD as a horror classic. Carpenter subsequently made some pretty rubbish movies (hello…
The Girl Can’t Help It / Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?
Time for a double blonde bombshell overload with this great pair….of posters. I wrote elsewhere about The Seven Year Itch, in which a middle aged man lusts after his younger sexy neighbour. Well, the same actor (Tom Ewell) does pretty much the same in The Girl Can’t Help It, only this time instead of Marilyn…
Terms Of Endearment
This is a movie I went into with very low expectations but ended up loving it. I’m not normally a fan of family drama ‘weepies’. (I generally will run a mile from anything by Nicholas Sparks, for example). But for Terms of Endearment I will make an exception. I saw this at the cinema in…
The Blues Brothers
I must admit I never I quite “got” the appeal of this cult movie. It grew out of a musical sketch on Saturday Night Live featuring comedians John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd and the movie’s plot (such as it is) – “a mission from God” to save an orphanage – is basically a loose…
Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte
In the 60s, melodramatic horror movies provided a late career fillip for a number of ageing Hollywood actresses. 1964’s Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte was originally conceived as a follow up to the hit Whatever Happened To Baby Jane. The plan was to again pair Bette Davis with Joan Crawford, to capitalise on their legendary real-life…
Joan Of Arc / Intermezzo
Here are a pair of very old Belgian posters for pivotal movies starring the late, great Ingrid Bergman. By the time she made 1948’s Joan of Arc, she was already a major Hollywood star, having won an Oscar for Gaslight and appeared opposite Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, her most famous role. She had also starred…
Saturday Night Fever
I must admit I never really ‘got’ this movie when it came out. I know it was a huge success and is now hailed as a classic, but I found it rather hokey at the time, and I still think it is somewhat over-rated. The movie’s effect on popular culture cannot be denied, however. It…