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Robert Eggers says his 'Nosferatu' remake is inspired by gothic horror classic ‘The Innocents’.The 41-year-old director has helmed the remake of 'Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror', F. W. Murnau's silent German Expressionist vampire film, but the 1922 movie is not the only inspiration for his latest horror.Eggers also was influenced by Jack Clayton’s 1961 picture ‘The Innocents’, which is based on 1898 novella 'The Turn of the Screw' by the American novelist Henry James and focuses on a governess who watches over two children and comes to fear that their large estate is haunted by ghosts and that the children are being possessed.During an appearance on Alamo Drafthouse’s YouTube series ‘Guest Selects’, the filmmaker said: “I think it is one of the best - perhaps the best - gothic ghost movie ever made. “I watch it a couple times a year probably for inspiration.

Tatjana Anders and Kyle James in Your Reality

It’s an old story. Boy meets girl. Boy and girl fall in love. Girl moves in with boy. Boy gradually cuts her off from all her friends, destroys her confidence and makes her feel completely dependent on him so that he can get away with behaving however he likes. Curiously enough, though the phenomenon takes its name from a film (based on a play) – Thorold Dickinson’s 1938 thriller Gaslight, remade in the US by George Cukor six years later – there are relatively few in recent history which have tackled it head on. Tatjana Anders wrote short film Your Reality in an effort to fill the gap.

Directed by Top Tarasin, the film follows Alicia (played by Anders herself), a young woman who stumbles into a relationship with a man who seems to adore her, only to find herself increasingly confused and distressed,...

by Cláudio Alves

Some would sell their soul for riches beyond compare, fame and the immortality that comes with it, or perchance beauty, wisdom, and other such treasures. The Faust of Teutonic legend yearned for all the knowledge in the world and pleasure to go with it. When Goethe re-imagined him as a dissatisfied scholar, Faust sought to trick Mephistopheles by asking for transcendence. Compared to these bargains, the protagonist of The Queen of Spades seems modest in his ambitions. For Captain Herman Suvorin of the Russian army, the immortal soul is an appropriate price to pay for the secret of winning at cards.

Starring Anton Walbrook and envisioned by director Thorold Dickinson, Suvorin's story becomes the basis for an oft-forgotten gem of Gothic Horror that's also one of Martin Scorsese's favorite movies…...

In 1866, Gustave Courbet painted The Origin of the World, a portrait of a woman’s nude torso and exposed vagina that still possesses the capacity to shock the straitlaced. On one level, the painting proves pretty definitively that there’s a fine line between a timeless work of art and a beaver shot. On another, it provides a convenient precursor for the cinematic sensibility of Spanish maverick Jess Franco, who seemingly never met a pussy he didn’t want to zoom unabashedly in on. This holds especially true for Lorna the Exorcist, wherein the female genitalia play a significant thematic as well as aesthetic role.

For what it’s worth, the film bears only the slightest passing resemblance to the William Friedkin classic that it’s ostensibly ripping off. Both films focus on a character located on the cusp between childhood and womanhood (though here she’s a bit of...

Also out during the Christmas and New Year period: ’Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical Singalong’ and ’Peter von Kant’.

In a special festive edition of the UK-Ireland box office preview, Screen has pulled together all the new titles to hit cinemas from December 23 up until January 1, including Corsage, Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody and a singalong version of Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical.

Out this weekend (December 23) is Wildcat for Dogwoof, in partnership with Amazon Studios. The documentary, which premiered this year at Telluride, follows a British soldier grappling with depression and post-traumatic stress disorder after...

Also out during the Christmas and New Year period: ’Corsage’ and ’Whitney Houston: I Wanna Dance With Somebody’.

In a special festive edition of the UK-Ireland box office preview, Screen has pulled together all the new titles to hit cinemas from December 23 up until January 1. A singalong version of Road Dahl’s Matilda The Musical is the widest release of the period, set to play at 775 locations from January 1.

Roald Dahl’s Matilda The Musical is directed by Matthew Warchus, with Dennis Kelly writing and Tim Minchin composing, and is based on the stage musical created by the same trio.

Thorold Dickinson’s 1949 Pushkin adaptation is a glorious melodrama about an ambitious Russian military officer and a countess who sold her soul to the devil in exchange for the secrets of a card game

Ambition, sin and horror are the keynotes of Thorold Dickinson’s brilliant 1949 melodrama based on the story by Pushkin. The density of visual detail and incident on screen is superb and the swirling, delirious onrush of storytelling is addictive. This is surely one of the great gambling movies, and one that makes the theological connection explicit: Pascal recommended that you have nothing to lose by betting on God’s existence, but the worldly sinner gambles that the last judgement does not exist and that pleasure and gratification in this life are everything. Dickinson’s control of the screen is a joy, something to be compared to Max Ophüls: I wonder how he might have directed The Earrings of Madame De…...

Patrick Hamilton's play "Gas Light" debuted on the London stage in 1938. It was about Jack and Bella, characters who had recently married but whose relationship is immediately rocky. She hates his flirtatious ways and mishandling of money. Most frustratingly, he seems to disappear from their home for hours at a time without explanation. During this time, the gaslights in the house would dim. Whenever Bella brought up this odd quirk or mentioned any missing objects, Jack would assure her that she was imagining it -- indeed, that she might be going insane. It is from Hamilton's play that the modern vernacular has taken "gaslighting" as a verb. 

"Gas Light" was first adapted to film in 1940 by director Thorold Dickinson. That version starred Anton Walbrook and Diana Wynyard, and it was a modest hit. The 1940 version, however, is not nearly as well-remembered as George Cukor's far more popular remake only four years later.

Isaac is an army veteran turned professional gambler when a chance for a grim rebalancing appears in Paul Schrader’s vehement drama

Here is a film about gambling from writer-director Paul Schrader and producer Martin Scorsese that begins with a closeup of the queen of spades – I’m betting it’s a sly reference to the Thorold Dickinson classic of the same title, about the game Faro, in which that card is such a terrible omen of ill fortune.

Schrader has created another drama about obsessive masculinity, fragile hope and potent despair competing for dominance in the heart of a man roaming a nocturnal world of sin – naturally it’s impossible not to see the echo of Schrader’s screenplay for the 1976 classic Taxi Driver. What did Travis Bickle actually do in Vietnam? (Or is the whole point that we don’t know?) And what if instead of a young...

During a three-hour discussion on a recent episode of “The Empire Film Podcast,” Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino revealed the existence of their makeshift quarantine movie club over the last 9 months. As Wright explained, “It’s nice. We’ve kept in touch in a sort of way that cinephiles do. It’s been one of the very few blessings of this [pandemic], the chance to disappear down a rabbit hole with the hours indoors that we have.” Tarantino added, “Edgar is more social than I am. It’s a big deal that I’ve been talking to him these past 9 months.”

A bulk of the film club was curated by none other than Martin Scorsese, who sent Wright a recommendation list of nearly 50 British films that Scorsese considers personal favorites. In the five months Wright spent in lockdown before resuming production on “Last Night in Soho” — and before he received the...

When Richard Bryce Goodman was a young man, his wide-ranging interests included photography, music and philosophy, but it was a present he received while growing up in Baltimore that seems to have had the biggest influence on his career arc.

“I had a darkroom from age 12 where friends and I used to make our own R&b mixes off Wwin radio with a fancy tape recorder that was given to me by a rich uncle,” says Goodman, an Academy Award-nominated sound mixer.

Goodman’s early training was eclectic. In the late ’60s, he attended London’s Slade School of Fine Art, gaining insight into moviemaking from the institution’s in-house film legend, Thorold Dickinson. Returning stateside, he earned a degree in fine art and philosophy from Bucknell University in 1970. He began shooting documentaries around the college’s art classes using a Bolex camera stocked with film short ends from the psych department.

The Queen of Spades

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1949/ 1.33:1 / 95 min.

Starring Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans

Directed by Throld Dickinson

One of the pleasures of discovering 1949’s The Queen of Spades is also discovering its director, Thorold Dickinson. Born and educated in Bristol, he abandoned Oxford for London to concentrate on the fine art of film editing and soon found himself behind the camera.

Dickinson made waves with 1940’s Gaslight but Queen was something of a critical flashpoint for the diligent director – called in as a last minute replacement, the project would cement his reputation as an artist whose portentous visual style said as much about his characters as any screenplay. Not coincidentally, those qualities were shared by the film’s associate producer, Jack Clayton.

Based on Alexander Pushkin’s 1834 short story, the film is set in a snowbound St. Petersburg enclave in 1803, a gothic inversion of one of Ernst Lubitsch‘s fairy tale villages.

Ingrid Bergman ca. early 1940s. Ingrid Bergman movies on TCM: From the artificial 'Gaslight' to the magisterial 'Autumn Sonata' Two days ago, Turner Classic Movies' “Summer Under the Stars” series highlighted the film career of Greta Garbo. Today, Aug. 28, '15, TCM is focusing on another Swedish actress, three-time Academy Award winner Ingrid Bergman, who would have turned 100 years old tomorrow. TCM has likely aired most of Bergman's Hollywood films, and at least some of her early Swedish work. As a result, today's only premiere is Fielder Cook's little-seen and little-remembered From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler (1973), about two bored kids (Sally Prager, Johnny Doran) who run away from home and end up at New York City's Metropolitan Museum. Obviously, this is no A Night at the Museum – and that's a major plus. Bergman plays an elderly art lover who takes an interest in them; her...

"Performance" is the theme of the new issue of Screen Machine, with essays on Al Pacino in Michael Mann's Heat (1995) and Anton Walbrook’s in Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight (1940 and more. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Time Out's polled directors, scientists and authors for its list of the "100 best sci-fi movies." Plus Terrence Rafferty on Jacques Demy, Adam Schatz on Alain Robbe-Grillet, Laya Maheshwari's conversation with Park Chan-wook, Jessica Kiang's interview with William Friedkin—and Josh Horowitz has gotten Woody Allen to appear on his first podcast. » - David Hudson...

"Performance" is the theme of the new issue of Screen Machine, with essays on Al Pacino in Michael Mann's Heat (1995) and Anton Walbrook’s in Thorold Dickinson's Gaslight (1940 and more. Also in today's roundup of news and views: Time Out's polled directors, scientists and authors for its list of the "100 best sci-fi movies." Plus Terrence Rafferty on Jacques Demy, Adam Schatz on Alain Robbe-Grillet, Laya Maheshwari's conversation with Park Chan-wook, Jessica Kiang's interview with William Friedkin—and Josh Horowitz has gotten Woody Allen to appear on his first podcast. » - David Hudson...

(Thorold Dickinson, 1940, BFI, PG)

Although he only directed eight features, Thorold Dickinson (1903-84) had as remarkable and wide-ranging a career in the British cinema as his close contemporaries David Lean and Anthony Asquith. Like Lean, he served a long apprenticeship as an editor. Like Asquith, a fellow liberal, Oxford-educated son of the establishment, he had an early interest in the avant-garde and played a significant role in organising Act, the film industry trade union.

As film critic of the Spectator, Graham Greene praised The High Command and The Arsenal Stadium Mystery, Dickinson's first two films, both thrillers. But there were long absences from commercial cinema. In the late 1930s he spent several years making leftwing documentaries supporting the Spanish government. Much of his second world war was devoted to public information pictures, and for several postwar years he produced pictures for the United Nations. In the 1960s he became Britain's...

Jean Kent: ‘The Browning Version’ 1951, Gainsborough folds (photo: Jean Kent in ‘The Browning Version,’ with Michael Redgrave) (See previous post: “Jean Kent: Gainsborough Pictures Film Star Dead at 92.”) Seemingly stuck in Britain, Jean Kent’s other important leads of the period came out in 1948: John Paddy Carstairs’ Alfred Hitchcock-esque thriller Sleeping Car to Trieste (1948), with spies on board the Orient Express, and Gordon Parry’s ensemble piece Bond Street. Following two minor 1950 comedies, Her Favorite Husband / The Taming of Dorothy and The Reluctant Widow / The Inheritance, Kent’s movie stardom was virtually over, though she would still have one major film role in store. In what is probably her best remembered and most prestigious effort, Jean Kent played Millie Crocker-Harris, the unsympathetic, adulterous wife of unfulfilled teacher Michael Redgrave, in Anthony Asquith’s 1951 film version of Terence Rattigan’s The Browning Version — a Javelin Films production...

★★★☆☆Austrian actor Anton Walbrook is perhaps best-known for his turn as ballet master Boris Lermontov in Powell and Pressburger's sumptuous The Red Shoes (1948). In that film, jealousy saw him prey on the fears and desires of Mora Shearer and eight years earlier he was causing similar mental anguish through manipulation in Gaslight (1940). Rereleased as part of the BFI's Gothic season, its narrative is also driven by an obsession over items of glimmering scarlet - on this occasion, some hidden rubies. Yet, it's a dearth of tension that ultimately lessens the impact of Thorold Dickinson's psychological drama.

From Nosferatu to Twilight, gothic films have explored what frightens us – and why we are willing victims of our fear. A few days before Halloween, and as the BFI begins a nationwide season, Michael Newton is seduced by horror, sex and satanism

Beyond high castle walls, the wolves howl. The Count intones: "Listen to them! The children of the night! What music they make!" And those words usher you into a faintly ludicrous cosiness, the comfortable darkness of gothic. For gothic properties are altogether snug, as familiar as Halloween costumes – a Boris Karloff mask, the Bela Lugosi cape, an Elsa Lanchester wig. So it is that many of us first come to the form through its parodies; I knew Carry On Screaming! by heart before I saw my first Hammer film. And yet, within the homely restfulness, something genuinely disturbing lurks; an authentic dread. And watching these films again, we...

Browse all the sections of the 57th London Film Festival (Oct 9-20) including the galas, competition titles and individual sections.

Alphabetical list of titles by section including feature premiere status

Wp = Wp

Ep = European Premiere

IP = International Premiere

UK = UK Premiere

Gala’s

Opening Night

Captain Phillips, Paul Greengrass (Us) Ep

Closing Night

Saving Mr Banks, John Lee Hancock (Us/UK) Ep

Philomena, Stephen Frears (UK) UK12 Years A Slave, Steve Mcqueen (UK) EPGravity, Alfonso Cuaron (Us) UKInside Llewyn Davis, Ethan Coen, Joel Coen (Us) UKLabor Day, Jason Reitman (Us) EPThe Invisible Woman, Ralph Fiennes (UK), EPThe Epic Of Everest, John Noel (UK) WPBlue Is The Warmest Colour, Abdellatif Kechiche (France) UKNight Moves, Kelly Reichardt (Us) UKStranger By The Lake, Alain Guiraudie (France) UKDon Jon, Joseph Gordon-Levitt (Us) UKMystery Road, Ivan Sen (Australia) UKOnly Lovers Left Alive, Jim Jarmusch (Us) UKNebraska, Alexander Payne (Us) UKWe Are The Best!, Lukas Moodysson (Sweden) EPFoosball 3D, Juan Jose Campanella (Argentina...

The British Film Institute (BFI) is to launch a major project dedicated to Gothic cinema, which includes more than 150 films and around 1,000 screenings throughout the UK.

Running from August until January 2014, the Gothic project include the longest ever season at BFI’s Southbank venue in London, UK wide theatrical and DVD releases, an education programme, a new BFI Gothic book, a range of partnerships, special guests and commentators including project ambassador Sir Christopher Frayling.

Heather Stewart, creative director at the BFI, said: “Gothic has never been more potent or popular, reflecting the turbulent times we are living in, our deepest fears and hidden passions.

“The British discovered sex in vivid Technicolor through Gothic. With a new generation gripped by the post modern Gothic world of Twilight’s ‘vegetarian’ vampires, Harry Potter’s spells and El James’s 50 Shades, its meaning has mutated yet again. It’s now time to look back into the deep dark beating heart of...

To mark the release of the Anna Wong double bill including Java Head and Tiger Bay on DVD now, Optimum Home Entertainment have been given three copies to give away!

Anna May Wong (1905 – 1961) was the first Asian American movie star to become an international star. Her career spanned over four decades. She started in Technicolor’s first two-strip color movie, The Toll of the Sea (1922) and was chosen by Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. to be in The Thief of Bagdad (1924), and co-starred with Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express (1932). Both Hollywood and Europe proclaimed her exoticism and she became known for her fluid grace and languid sexuality on screen.

Java Head (1934) – Directed by Thorold Dickinson & J. Walter Ruben and starring Anna May Wong, Elizabeth Allan and John Loder

A heavy-breathing melodrama of the White Cargo school, Java Head was adapted from the novel by Joseph Hergesheimer.

The port city of Bristol, England,...

Fifty years ago, Thorold Dickinson kickstarted the first British film studies course at Ucl. It didn't last long – but its influence did

It's 50 years since film first became a university subject in Britain. Earlier dates are arguable, but on 16 January 1961 Thorold Dickinson gave his inaugural lecture in the physics theatre at University College London, accompanied by a programme evoking the dawn of cinema. Later dates have also been argued, and the general perception of film studies and its origins still involves a very 1970s blend of structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic theory. Dickinson's department was a more free-spirited affair and has paid the price in obscurity and misrepresentation.

The idea had come from the BFI, the money from Wardour Street, and the Slade was in the frame largely because its director, William Coldstream, had in his 1930s youth dabbled in documentary under the tutelage of John Grierson. Coldstream's old colleagues were...

The Russian impresario had a profound effect on 1920s film-making, yet he never made a movie himself

Sergei Diaghilev's Ballets Russes sparked a revolution in taste after the first world war, taking modernism out of the salon and into the music hall. The splendid exhibition Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballets Russes, currently showing at the V&A, covers the impresario's legacy in music, dance, fashion, painting, and literature; but less well documented is the spell he cast over British film. Michael Powell, who drew on 1920s memories of the Diaghilev milieu for The Red Shoes, was just one among a generation of cineastes who found inspiration in the same source.

Ballet sequences held a special appeal for the likes of Anthony Asquith and Thorold Dickinson, who cast the young Audrey Hepburn as a ballerina in Secret People; but their interest went beyond merely recording dance on film.

"Alone in the hissing laboratory of his wishes, Mr Pugh minces among bad vats and jeroboams, tiptoes through spinneys of murdering herbs, agony dancing in his crucibles, and mixes especially for Mrs Pugh a venomous porridge unknown to toxicologists which will scald and viper through her until her ears fall off like figs, her toes grow big and black as balloons, and steam comes screaming out of her navel." —Dylan Thomas, Under Milk Wood.

Britain's film industry in the nineteen-forties, stoked to new heights of relevance and seriousness by the mission of wartime, rolled on with considerable momentum, arguably climaxing in 1948, the year that saw production of Powell & Pressburger's The Red Shoes, Thorold Dickinson's The Queen of Spades, Olivier's Hamlet and David Lean's Oliver Twist. (It couldn't last: the same year saw the Rank Organisation introduce Production Facilities Limited, quickly nicknamed Piffle, a body intended to strategize...

Fish Tank

DVD, Artificial Eye

Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank is very much in the UK's lineage of social realist dramas. As with the works of Tony Richardson, through Ken Loach and Alan Clarke, Fish Tank presents, or rather captures, the world warts and all – even going as far as being filmed in the more TV-like aspect ratio of 1.33:1 to avoid any accidental glamour that widescreen might have delivered. The situations here are familiar to any follower of kitchen-sink drama but the settings and language have been updated, and it's in these details that Arnold really shows her talent. Mia (Katie Jarvis) is an argumentative and bored Essex teenager who dreams of becoming a dancer – her lonely practice sessions in a vacant council flat are her only real moments of calm. It's easy to see why she's so aggressive, with her limited opportunities and her single mother constantly chipping away at her.

Thorold Dickinson (1903-1984) was almost forgotten at the time of his death, but in his heyday as a director, and subsequently as a pioneer of film studies, was one of the most important figures in British cinema. The High Command (1936), was acclaimed by Graham Greene; The Next of Kin (1942) is one of the most important films of the Second World War; Lindsay Anderson's Making a Film is a diary of the production of Dickinson's political thriller The Secret People (1952). The Queen of Spades (1949), a stylish, polished melodrama based on the Pushkin novella, is his most accomplished film, and it's good to have it back on the big screen. Anton Walbrook is outstanding as the impoverished, embittered engineer officer in the tsarist army, set apart by his poverty from his aristocratic fellow officers and attempting to get rich by obtaining the demonic gambling secrets of an ancient countess (Edith Evans...

Out This Week

Avatar (12A)

(James Cameron, 2009, Us) Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver. 163 mins

The King Of The World returns with an awesomely expensive epic that makes everything else out there look cheap. It really is a visit to a strange new world: part-prog rock album cover, part-Japanese anime come to life. The mix of real action and animation is flawless, the 3D is unobtrusively immersive, and Cameron has lost none of his gift for gripping, purposeful action. It's a shame the story is so un-revolutionary: a formulaic mix of A Man Called Horse, other Cameron movies, The Matrix Sequels, and Ferngully: The Last Rainforest, all washed down with an eco message that's at odds with the technological spectacle served up. But you'd be churlish not to be carried away by the experience. Come on, this is amazing!

Nine (12A)

(Rob Marshall, 2009, Us) Daniel Day-Lewis, Marion Cotillard, Penélope Cruz.

Thorold Dickinson's gripping and intricately designed British classic from 1948, based on Pushkin's short story, is now rereleased - preceded with an ebullient new on-screen introduction from Martin Scorsese. Anton Walbrook plays Captain Suvorin, an impoverished military captain in 19th-century Russia, resentfully out of his depth with the aristocrats of the officers' mess and longing for the money to match his ambition. Like many of the time, he daringly admires the meritocratic genius of Russia's great enemy, Napoleon, and is obsessed with gambling.

Suvorin is galvanised by the rumour that ugly old Countess Ranevskaya, played by Edith Evans, has sold her soul to the devil for the secret of winning at cards; he plans to offer her a chilling new Mephistophelean bargain: he will take her sin on his own soul, if she will only tell him how to make a fortune at the card-table. Dickinson's film is full of...