Author Martyn Bamber

1. Anecdotes The other day, I don’t know if it was in Stockholm or London. Pouring rain. I saw a little girl, about seven years old, holding an umbrella. I couldn’t see her face. The umbrella was colorful and ...

I. “le look” Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. A tale as old as time, except that writer/director Leos Carax shuffles these familiar story elements and upends romantic expectations. His 1984 debut...

Alfred Hitchcock, when discussing a key plot point of The Lady Vanishes (1939) with François Truffaut, mentions “the plausibles”, a reference to those people looking for absolute believability in films. This re...

For many cineastes – especially outside of Japan – director Seijun Suzuki is the reluctant master of the yakuza genre. His international fame and notoriety is solely based on two wildly original, inventive, and...

Reporting on the Pesaro Film Festival in Italy, 1970, Dan Georgakas proclaimed:  The Pesaro films tended to fall into two easy categories, the typical avant film stressing technique and the hard-core political...

Yasuzo Masumura has an eclectic filmography that spans many genres. American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, an ardent champion of Masumura, notes that the Japanese director’s films cover a variety of “grouping...

At the time of the 2004 UK cinema release of Samira Makhmalbaf’s third feature Panj é asr (At Five in the Afternoon, 2003), an introduction to an article on the Makhmalbaf family titled “Iranian House Style” re...

From its opening moments, Padre Padrone (1977) defies expectations. On the surface, this film by brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, which is based on an autobiography by Gavino Ledda, begins with Gavino as a ...

Une Femme est Une Femme (A Woman Is a Woman, 1961) seems like an oddity in the film canon of Jean-Luc Godard. The second feature Godard released after À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), it has the cinelitera...

The first thing you should know is that Western is not really a western.  Just because a film features horses, guns and the great outdoors doesn’t mean that it’s a Western; just because it’s set in Bulgaria do...

Out of the worst crime novels I have ever read, Jules Dassin has made the best crime film I have ever seen. For the record, Dassin’s most famous films, The Naked City and Rififi, are among his lesser works. P...

2022 marks 100 years since the release of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (hereafter referred to as Nosferatu), meaning its impact on cinema history in gene...

Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s first English language film Despair (1978) is a fascinating entry in his filmography: while it is set in Germany, it is his first film in English, with iconic English actor Dirk Bogar...

Seeing the murder mystery thriller Gumnaam (The Unknown, Raja Nawathe, 1965) for the first time this year, the film’s opening song and dance number is a standout pop music sequence. Gumnaam starts with two murd...

While the Western is primarily known as an American cinematic institution, this has not stopped other countries from enthusiastically embracing the genre, the most notable being Italy with the ‘Spaghetti’ Weste...

Writing about Les Enfants Terribles in mid-2020 during a global pandemic, it is tempting to draw parallels between the seclusion of real-world citizens in their homes and the self-imposed isolation of the film’...

“A repetition of identical days, the only variant of which is the cinephile menu”. – Ne croyez surtout pas que je hurle (Just Don't Think I'll Scream, Frank Beauvais, 2019) “Si les temps sont durs et mauvais...

Skewering celebrity vanity, the allure of success and the obsession with fame, Kiss Me, Stupid (1964) takes a long, hard look at these subjects and is simultaneously fascinated and appalled, amused and aghast a...

The subject of The Servant (1963) is the English class system and its tensions in swinging sixties London. The battleground for this class struggle is mainly confined to a single location, a house owned by Tony...

How has cinema changed over the last 10 years? This question is not about the art or business of cinema; it refers to the cinemagoing experience itself. Arguably, the movement that has had – and continues to ha...

The autobiographical films of Terence Davies are not simply nostalgic journeys into the director’s past; they are piercing insights into the filmmaker’s turbulent early life. While Distant Voices, Still Lives (...

Elaine May’s film directing debut, A New Leaf (1971) is a pitch-black comedy centred on Henry Graham (Walter Matthau), an affluent, self-absorbed bachelor, who finds his expensive lifestyle in jeopardy due to h...

Sōshun (Early Spring, 1956) follows Yasujirō Ozu’s classic Tōkyō monogatari (Tokyo Story, 1953) in continuing to develop the director’s characteristic themes, including the demands of family life, the maintenan...

Emerging from a troubled production history, Moontide seems overlooked in the annals of film history in general, and the story of 20th Century-Fox in particular. For instance, the entry on Moontide in The Films...

Made during the period of François Truffaut’s fascination with Alfred Hitchcock, the French auteur’s La mariée était en noir (The Bride Wore Black, 1968) looks to the master of suspense for inspiration whilst s...

Zwartboek (Black Book) is a Holland homecoming for director Paul Verhoeven, returning to the Netherlands from the United States after the technically accomplished but narratively conventional (for Verhoeven) Ho...

The Coen Brothers’ filmography can be broadly split into two strands: the serious works such as Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996) and No Country for Old Men (2007), and comedic diversions like The Big Lebowski ...

Sam Peckinpah has a popular reputation as a macho movie director obsessed with portraying graphic scenes of violence and pursuing a relentlessly misogynistic outlook, particularly in the films he made after The...

“If you like outrageous cinema, you live and breathe to wait for those weird moments that happen every once in a while in genre cinema, where it’s like, you can’t believe you’re seeing what you’re seeing.” - Q...

The film starts in virtual silence. There is no music or dialogue, and the only sound we hear is some faint background noise. We see four people standing before some music stands and gesturing at each other in ...

Day of Wrath/Vredens dag (1943 Denmark 100 mins) Prod Co: Palladium Film Prod: Tage Nielsen Dir: Carl Theodor Dreyer Scr: Mogens Skot-Hansen, Poul Knudsen, Carl Theodor Dreyer, based on the play Anne Ped...

Macbeth (1971 UK/USA 140 mins) Prod Co: Playboy Productions/Columbia Pictures Prod: Andrew Braunsberg Dir: Roman Polanski Scr: Roman Polanski, Kenneth Tynan, from the play by William Shakespeare Phot: Gi...

Gone to Earth (1950 UK 110 mins) Source: BFI/Disney Prod Co: London Film Productions/Vanguard Productions Prod: David O. Selznick, Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger Dir: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburg...

The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan) (1960 Sweden 88 mins) Source: ACMI Collections Prod Co: Svensk Filmindustri Prod: Ingmar Bergman, Allan Ekelund (Uncredited) Dir: Ingmar Bergman Screenplay: Ulla Isaksso...

  If there ever was a face that you could say – without hesitation – the camera loved, it is the divine face of Louise Brooks. After leaving Hollywood in 1928, Brooks went to Germany and was cast by dir...

The Battle of Midway (1942 USA 18 mins) Source: NLA/ACMI Prod Co: U.S. Navy, War Activities Committee/20th Century Fox Prod, Dir: John Ford Narration: John Ford, Dudley Nichols, James Kevin McGuinness Ph...