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Deadly by design - a film noir masterpiece
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 14/12/2012
» There are very few good people in Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly, and those who do appear are on the screen for only a few minutes, usually terrified and trembling at the doom that they know awaits them. The world is never a hospitable place in the film noir movies made in Hollywood during the late 1940s and early 1950s. All are steeped in the mood of pessimism created by World War II with its extermination camps and nuclear bombings. But Kiss Me Deadly, released in 1955, is the most hopeless and least romantic of them all.
Pure cinematic fantasy
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 30/03/2012
» Almost as impressive as his own films in recent years has been Martin Scorsese's work as a guide to and curator of other directors' work. His loving cinematic tours of Italian cinema and personal favourites from the US and other countries have attracted millions of viewers to films that they may never had heard of otherwise. He does not take us back yet again to Citizen Kane or Grand Illusion or Intolerance. His choices are often obscure movies that he saw on television as a boy in New York _ often, I suspect, on the old 1950s Million Dollar Movie programme_ and never forgot. Scorsese has also been active in the restoration old films, and viewers who watch elaborately-documented DVD editions of classic films like those issued by Criterion will find him turning up from time to time doing commentary tracks on which his enthusiasm is impossible to resist.
Hypnotic epic
Life, Plalai Faifa, Published on 02/03/2012
» Most of the mysteries referred to in the title are of the kind found in those immense, ultra-melodramatic serialised novels that kept 19th-century readers waiting for the next issue. The generous documentary extras included with this new release explain that the super-prolific Camilo Costelo Branco, whose 1854 serial novel Mysteries of Lisbon is adapted here, sometimes wrote these long-running, cliffhanging narratives. So here we have all of the mothers dead in childbirth, multiple identities, long-shot coincidences, crimes of passion, stories-within-stories-within-stories, and other tasty ingredients that make those books fun to read even today.