Author Eloise Ross

Before beginning, I offer the disclaimer that I am not an unbiased writer of this Great Actors profile. I have a tattoo of Barbara Stanwyck. It’s an image of her as Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (Bill...

Watch the trailer for What’s Up, Doc? (1972) and you are likely to learn quite a lot about the director, Peter Bogdanovich, and the era that the film emerged from. If you are uninitiated with the film itself, i...

My films are actors’ films, films of human relationships. I never think, “How can I dazzle the audience with my camera?” I want to dazzle them with the truth. And for that you need the human face. No landscape ...

It was rather poetic that my first IRL interaction with the festival, on the Sunday of the first weekend, was a much-anticipated, rarest-of-rare screening of The Afterlight (2021). Charlie Shackleton’s film was...

This lightly sophisticated comedy, indulging in its opportunities at the tail-end of two eras – those of silent cinema, and the Weimar Republic’s Golden Twenties – has something that we might call the Marlene t...

“Some of my best friends are ghosts,” says Dr. John Holden (Dana Andrews). He is being sarcastic (and Dana Andrews was one of the best serious men at reading a dry line); Holden, a “prominent psychologist” invi...

In this grim, sexy film noir about corrupt male police officers, its lasting effect can be attributed to its lead woman, Ida Lupino. Yet the first woman on screen in Private Hell 36 (Don Siegel, 1954) is Doroth...

Dreams Father: “Have you ever been there?” Joan: “Often! In my dreams.” We’ve all been to places in our dreams. If they are positive dreams, with resonances that we yearn for, we might take a train, bus, and...

“And the man and the woman were naked together, and were unashamed.” These words are spoken in voiceover as the camera slowly pans across Venetian waters and a frieze featuring Adam and Eve, their bodies almo...

Published pseudonymously in 1949 under the author name ‘Olivia’, Dorothy Bussy’s novel Olivia was likely written thanks to the influence of the 1931 German film Mädchen in Uniform (Girls in Uniform, Leontine Sa...

“I just close my eyes and a sing, and I feel like I’m above the crowd.” - Jo Kennedy as Jackie Mullens, Starstruck (Gillian Armstrong, 1982) Made in 1982, Starstruck is the earliest feature film covered by t...

Before Baz Luhrmann presented Sydney’s Coca Cola sign as a glittering icon and made it as famous as the city’s Harbour Bridge, other filmmakers had already recognised its symbolic potential: Mary Callaghan feat...

Directed by Don Siegel from a screenplay by Albert Maltz, it might seem odd that Two Mules For Sister Sara has a place in a Budd Boetticher dossier, given that he was not involved in production, nor seen on set...

“I didn’t sign on to be your slave.” It’s the cry of every woman who has ever been born, and every country who has ever been created, annexed, oppressed. Hungarian woman Izabela Garodi (Eva Ras) speaks these wo...

Visita ou Memórias e Confissões is Manoel de Oliveira’s lasting cinematic elegy: a visit to a house filled with evidence of a life well lived, an exploration of memories that permeate through spaces and objects...

“Facts are such horrid things!” writes Mrs Alicia Johnson to Lady Susan Vernon in Jane Austen’s early novella, Lady Susan. In Whit Stillman’s film Love & Friendship (2016), adapted from Austen's posthumous...

“With your ingenuity it will be easy to make up a story.” So Martha Strable Van Cleve (Gene Tierney) writes in a telegram when quarrelling with her husband, Henry Van Cleve (Don Ameche). As maestro of the famed...

After the opening night choice of Los amantes pasajeros (I’m so Excited!), which enthusiastically promised the complexities of a Pedro Almodóvar script and direction but instead relied on bland character conven...

Anthony Mann had been working in Hollywood for almost a decade before he made himself widely known as a distinctive filmmaker, an impact that was augmented perhaps by his collaboration with one of the most reco...

This article provides a penetrating analysis of the often over looked importance of audio elements and their design in a range of 1950’s film noirs.