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Eric Barbier, director of The Last Diamond: "This is the kind of film that has not been made for a long time. In France we have done quite a few of these heist movies in the past, but suddenly we seemed to have stopped doing them. I find the a bit sad." Although director Eric Barbier has signed an elegant and sophisticated thriller The Last Diamond his start in the business was with a very different proposition: Le Brasier, made in 1985 and set in the coal fields in the north of France in the Thirties. It was an expensive production which was so shunned by the public and some the critics that it took him a long time to get back in to the fray. It had consumed almost ten years of his life. He burst back with Toreros, set against the world of bullfighting and dealing with a relationship...

Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith have won a grant to complete a book on Peter Watkins. More film book news: Miranda July's debut novel, The First Bad Man, will be out on January 13. Iain Sinclair reviews Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin for the Tls. For Slate, Michelle Orange reviews a reissue of MacDonald Harris's 1982 novel Screenplay. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Nette revisits the 1970 novel by Ted Lewis that became Get Carter. And in the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Scott Saul's Becoming Richard Pryor. » - David Hudson...

Rachael Rakes and Leo Goldsmith have won a grant to complete a book on Peter Watkins. More film book news: Miranda July's debut novel, The First Bad Man, will be out on January 13. Iain Sinclair reviews Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin for the Tls. For Slate, Michelle Orange reviews a reissue of MacDonald Harris's 1982 novel Screenplay. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Nette revisits the 1970 novel by Ted Lewis that became Get Carter. And in the New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Scott Saul's Becoming Richard Pryor. » - David Hudson...

After all the debates, controversies, and stereotype accusations have cleared, looking back on Blaxploitation cinema today it’s easy to see healthy portions of the crime and action genres. Using these genres and the struggles of the black community, these films were created for those that wanted to see African American characters on the big screen not taking shit from the man, “getting over”, and–above all else—being the heroes in movies. In the documentary Baad Asssss Cinema, Samuel L. Jackson gives his take on the heroes of Blaxploitation: “We were tired of seeing the righteous black man. And all of a sudden we had guys who were…us. Or guys who did the things we wanted those guys to do.”

The unsung supporting players in these films that backed Fred Williamson and Pam Grier and many other stars were people acting and making a living off of it.

Saint Joan (at the Access Theater at 380 Broadway through May 13)Do you have three-plus hours for Joan of Arc, i.e., the George Bernard Shaw liberal-individualist version? Believe me, you do. And I have four actors for you: Andrus Nichols (as Joan), Tom O’Keefe, Ted Lewis, and Eric Tucker (who also directs). This doughty quartet, armed with minimal costume and light and no set to speak of, burn like meteors through Shaw’s meta-historic epic. Oh, for a muse of muslin! Without a flat or a caster, the Bedlam theater company works genuine miracles. Can the unworthy scaffold of the Access Theater bring forth so great an object? Can a cockpit that looks like it’s hosted actual cockfights hold the vast fields of France? You bet it can.In this brisk, lucid, and (for once, appropriately) declamatory production, Shaw’s uncompromising humanism and unshakeable faith in the power...

Cinema Retro has received the following press release:

Ian Hendry Michael Caine Brit Ekland

Get Carter

40th Anniversary of Cult Classic

March 2011

"(Like a) bottle of neat gin swallowed before breakfast" George Melly (1971)

This March will mark a landmark anniversary for the original British gangster movie, as Get Carter turns 40. Lauded as the Best British Film of All Time (Total Film), Mike Hodges's directorial debut delivered a classic 70s thriller, and captured a young Michael Caine at perhaps his finest hour. Available on DVD from Warner Home Video, Get Carter is an essential addition to any film collection.

Adapted from the 1968 novel 'Jack's Return Home', by Ted Lewis, Get Carter finds vicious London gangstar, Jack Carter (Michael Caine), returning to Newcastle for his brother's funeral. Suspecting foul play, Carter's quest for the truth leads to a complex trail of lies, deceit, cover-ups and backhanders, all played out against the...

It's 40 years since Get Carter hit British cinemas. The Guardian goes to meet the man in charge of the birthday celebrations

It's not even midday, and already my head is filled with stuff both unpleasant and grimly compelling: murder, violence, organised crime, the lower-grade parts of the sex industry, you name it. Having already visited pubs, houses, and the ruins of industrial installations, we've just called in at a cemetery; the next stop is a riverside location that will bring back memories of a reckless shoot-out.

This is a dry run for a guided tour conceived to mark the 40th birthday of Mike Hodges's Get Carter, the brilliant British film that set Michael Caine – in the role of Jack Carter – loose around Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Gateshead and beyond. My host is Chris Phipps, a film-maker and former producer on the Newcastle-located TV music show The Tube, who is an illuminating authority...

Bernie Casey strides purposefully through Hit Man, his flamboyant hat tilted at a rakish angle over a graying Afro, his ex-professional-football player frame squeezed into a series of tight trousers. If he emerges as Hit Man’s hero, it’s only because his brutally efficient enforcer qualifies as marginally less evil than the human parasites around him. Miami Blues and Grosse Pointe Blank director George Armitage directed this 1972 blaxploitation adaptation of Jack’s Return Home, the Ted Lewis novel that previously inspired the seminal British gangster film Get Carter. He strands Casey’s grittily charismatic protagonist in some of ...