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My top thirty-two films of 2015
This year, I watched 365 films (though I could not work up the energy to transcribe the incomplete-because-of-system-constraints list from my FB page this morning, so you will have to go dig around...
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The City in Fiction and Film, week 14
This week we continued our exploration of the US postwar suburbs (see week 13), reading Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and watching Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (Siegel 1956). Both texts were...
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The City in Fiction and Film, week 15. Urban alienation: machines for living...
Week 14 This week we turned from the American suburbs to futuristic (that is, 1960s) Paris, with Alphaville (Godard 1965). But first we took a trip through the history of representations of the city in...
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The 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick 1968) haikus
*************************************************************** *************************************************************** *************************************************************** Beyond...
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The Hands of Orlac, and its adaptations
[This is one of several pieces written for a book on adaptations that has never appeared] Maurice Renard’s Les Mains d’Orlac/The Hands of Orlac (1920), adapted as Orlacs Hände (Robert Wiene 1924), Mad...
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The Walk (Robert Zemeckis 2015)
And so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Walk (2015) – Robert Zemeckis’s attempt to turn thirty-five million dollars, the full cutting-edge apparatus of digital and 3D filmmaking, a...
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Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – The Drowned World (J. Lee...
Thwarted in his attempt to produce and star in an adaptation of The Wind from Nowhere (1961), Stanley Baker optioned Ballard’s follow-up novel, The Drowned World (1962), before the ‘Seer of...
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Ballard’s Cinema: Notes for a Retrospective – Jodorowsky’s Burning World...
Broadcaster David Frost and his partner Hazel Adair, perhaps best known as the creator of the long-running soap opera Crossroads (1964–88), bought the rights to adapt The Drought aka The Burning World...
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Contact (Robert Zemeckis 1997)
Last week I was invited to introduce a screening of Contact – a film I had seen twice in twenty years and then saw twice in the same week – as part of this series at Bristol Cathedral. (The last film I...
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The Killing of a Sacred Deer (Yorgos Lanthimos 2017)
and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about The Killing of a Sacred Deer (2017), Yorgos Lanthimos’s tepidly comic but ultimately toothless mash-up of Ballard, Kubrick and Lynch, is not the...
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