The L-Shaped Room is a stagy 1962 adaptation of a Lynne Reid Banks novel about pregnant French socialite Leslie Caron in a London bedsit, and is famous only to Smiths obsessives due to it being the source of the opening sample from The Queen Is Dead. John Schlesinger's 1965 Darling is a key text from the Swinging London canon, breezily and brilliantly skewering vacuous underwear model Diana Scott (Julie Christie) as she seduces her way into wealthy despair.
Belated DVD release for Stephen (Blade) Norrington's flaccid 2001 meditation on the nature of, wince, 'celebrity culture'. Max Beesley, ineffably irritating in Alfie mode, is Billy Byrne, a talentless wannabe whose driving desire for fame sends him on a Hellish Journey™ through London's criminal drug-dealing S&M underworld. Hateful characters, no discernible narrative voice, and hackneyed visuals. A mistake.
One of the best swashbucklers ever made. Tyrone Power is Don Diego de Vega—the son of a nobleman out to save the peasants of Olde Californy (and Linda Darnell) from the villainous Basil Rathbone. Fantastic swordfights (Rathbone was an Olympic duellist), and Power shows exactly how derring-do should be done.
The Family Way sees squeaky-clean Hayley Mills as the perfect daughter to real-life dad John in this cautionary 1966 tale of a young married couple struggling with financial hardships and the apparently grim realities of married life. Accident, on the other hand, is a brooding psychodrama, written by Harold Pinter, directed by Joseph Losey and starring Dirk Bogarde as a tragic philosophy professor obsessed by Jacqueline Sassard's voluptuous student.
The medium-defining shibboleth that induces paroxysms of adulation from film critics (but not filmgoers), Citizen Kane has become, in its inviolable immensity, the cinematic equivalent of its own overbearing protagonist, Charles Foster Kane. Yes, the 25-year-old Orson Welles' direction is astounding. Yes, Welles and Herman Mankiewicz's screenplay is a pointed satire of paper baron William Randolph Hearst. Yes, Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography is sumptuous. Yes, Bernard Herrmann's score is eerily ominous.
Not even the presence of Peter Lorre can save Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea from being shoddy, badly written B-movie dreck. Fantastic Voyage may be creaky, but it's still great fun. Gasp as doctors (including Raquel Welch) get miniaturised and injected into the bloodstream of a comatose scientist to operate on his brain. Worth it for the impressively psychedelic SFX alone.
Pam Grier is a nurse turned vigilante, on a mission to avenge her strung-out kid sister by taking out the pushers, bad cops and corrupt politicians feeding off her neighbourhood. Hustling along to Roy Ayres' soundtrack, Jack Hill's 1973 movie is often grisly but treats its sex and violence with a surprising, and refreshing, matter-of-factness.
After a series of stunning cameo performances and a flamboyant turn opposite Robert De Niro in Flawless, Philip Seymour Hoffman makes full use of his first unopposed lead, running the gamut of grief as a successful techie crushed and drawn to petrol-sniffing by his wife's suicide. Fraught, funny, hysterical and truly touching.
Beloved spoof western which follows Jane Fonda's eponymous heroine, a schoolmarm-turned-outlaw, as she hires Lee Marvin's washed-up drunken gunslinger to stand against the lethal, tinnosed varmint (Marvin again) who killed her father. Never quite as funny as it thinks, but Marvin is sharp as a razor.
A rock'n'roll movie without sex and drugs? Tom Hanks' directorial debut is an anachronism and proud of it. This tale of 1960s teen-pop sensation The Wonders (as in "one-hit") is breezy and good-natured, with Steve Zahn providing most of the laughs. The title tune by The Knack's Adam Schlesinger gets heavy rotation; thankfully it's a Beatle-esque beauty.
