News

Classic horror anthologies Flesh and Fantasy and Dead of Night will be released in a limited edition Blu-ray box set on April 30 via Australia’s Imprint.

Julien Duvivier helms 1943’s Flesh and Fantasy. Charles Boyer, Barbara Stanwyck, Edward G. Robinson, Betty Field, Robert Cummings, Robert Benchley, Thomas Mitchell, Charles Winninger, and Anna Lee star.

When a jittery businessman complains of a disturbing dream, a friend relates three stories to help calm his nerves. A homely dressmaker wears a mask of beauty to attract a man on Mardi Gras night; a fortune teller predicts an eminent lawyer will commit a murder; and a high-wire artist, haunted by a nightmare in which he suffers a fall, romances a woman who resembles the one he had seen in his dream.

Flesh and Fantasy special features:

Audio commentary by film historians Rodney Barnett and Adrian Smith (new) Video essay by film scholar Joseph Dwyer...

As the nights grow longer and the air turns crisp, it’s the perfect time to settle in with some of the best spooky films ever made. From eerie silent classics to modern horror hits, spooky cinema has evolved across decades, yet each era has its own spine-tingling gems. Whether you love atmospheric terror or heart-pounding scares, here’s a journey through the best films from the 1920s to today that will give you chills. Things to do: Subscribe to The Hollywood Insider’s YouTube Channel, by clicking here. Limited Time Offer – Free Subscription to The Hollywood Insider Click here to read more on The Hollywood Insider’s vision, values and mission statement here – Media has the responsibility to better our world – The Hollywood Insider fully focuses on substance and meaningful entertainment, against gossip and scandal, by combining entertainment, education, and philanthropy. 1920s - 1980s ‘The Haunting’ (1963) Cast: Julie Harris,...

Glen Powell’s star power has hit new heights with the release of Twisters, the highly anticipated sequel to the 1996 blockbuster.

Powell’s charisma shines in this summer’s hit, leaving fans eager to explore his other movies.

At 35, the Texas native has become one of Hollywood’s most sought-after actors, consistently delivering stellar performances over the past decade.

The opening weekend of Twisters saw a staggering $81.25 million box office, far exceeding expectations and marking the third-biggest debut of the year.

Powell and his Hidden Figures cat won Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture at the Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2017.

He also won Best Actor for his role in Hit Man at the Astra Midseason Movie Awards in 2024.

Here are five must-watch Glen Powell movies:

1. Everybody Wants Some!!: Richard Linklater’s 2016 film Everybody Wants Some!! introduced many to Glen Powell. This spiritual sequel to Dazed and Confused...

Glen Powell's rise in Hollywood is unstoppable, with exciting projects like Top Gun: Maverick and Hit Man showcasing his talent and versatility. The Running Man remake with Powell under director Edgar Wright promises to captivate modern audiences with a fresh take on the classic story. Powell's potential collaboration with J.J. Abrams for an upcoming film has fans eagerly anticipating what this dynamic duo will bring to the screen next.

Glen Powell has fast become one of the most sought-after actors working in Hollywood today, and with plenty of exciting upcoming films, the hype around him does not look set to slow down anytime soon. Although Powell had small roles in film and television since the early 2000s, it was not until his breakout performance in Top Gun: Maverick that he gained widespread recognition. Following this, Powell continued to gain acclaim in works like the Sydney Sweeney rom-com Anyone But You,...

To celebrate the release of Kind Hearts and Coronets released for the first time on Uhd on 22 April – we have a Uhd to give away to one lucky winner!

Kind Hearts and Coronets is the jewel in Ealing Studios’ crown, and arguably one of the finest British films ever made.

Hailing from the Golden-Age of Ealing Comedies and the same year as Passport to Pimlico and Whisky Galore!, Kind Hearts and Coronets stars Dennis Price as the debonair yet impoverished Louis Mazzini, the would-be Duke of Chalfont whose mother was disinherited by her noble family, the D’Ascoynes, for marrying beneath her. When her dying wish to be buried in the family crypt is refused, Louis vows to avenge his mother and work his way up the family tree, by engaging in the gentle art of murder. One by one he attempts to kill off the eight successors that stand...

Two Ealing classics – The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts & Coronets – are heading to 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray: more here.

Lovely, lovely news for fans of the wonderful Ealing Studios: a pair of its most-loved films have been given a 4K restoration, and are heading to the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray format.

Charles Crichton’s The Lavender Hill Mob – which is also getting a cinema re-release in the UK this March – is arriving in a special Vintage Classics Collectors Edition set. That set includes a 64-page booklet, artcards, postcards, a Blu-ray and a 4K disc. Included too is an introduction from Martin Scorsese, and new extra features including a London Comedy Film Festival Q&a with Paul Merton.

The film is available for preorder now, and you can find more information – and get a copy – right here.

The release date for The Lavender Hill Mob on 4K disc is 22nd April,...

This post contains spoilers for Emerald Fennell's new film "Saltburn."

In "Saltburn," Barry Keoghan plays a nerdy boarding school student named Oliver Quick who has trouble making friends at school. He eventually manages to attract the attention of Felix (Jacob Elordi), an ultra-rich and ultra-popular classmate that everyone, regardless of gender or sexuality, seems to be attracted to. Oliver and Felix slowly bond, and Felix offers to host Oliver at his sprawling estate, Saltburn, for the span of a weeks-long school break. There is a notable scene wherein Felix gives Oliver a tour of the manse, flippantly pointing out the various palatial rooms individually.

When finally at Saltburn, however, Oliver's true colors soon begin to show. He's not the shy wilting flower everyone had previously assumed, but a conniving sneak who has a plot of his own. It seems Oliver doesn't just want to be Felix's friend, but he...

Above: 1963 German re-release poster by Heinz Edelmann for Kind Hearts and Coronets.If you are near Berlin during the next four months there is a movie poster exhibition that you must not miss. It opens today at the Kulturforum and it is called Grosses Kino: Filmplakate aller Zeiten, which translates as The Big Screen: Film Posters of All Time.Grosses Kino has been curated by Dr. Christina Thomson and Christina Dembny of the Kunstbibliothek, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (the Art Library at the Berlin State Museum) in collaboration with the Berlin International Film Festival and the Deutsche Kinemathek. The Kunstbibliothek has an extraordinary collection of over 5,000 film posters, 300 of which—dating from 1905 to 2023—have been selected for the exhibition. Earlier this year I was asked to be one of 26 “film industry experts” from the fields of acting, directing, cinema management, film studies, art, and graphic design selected to choose one...

The Oscars celebrate excellence in the world of filmmaking, and the people who write the stories and scripts are a huge part of it.

Variety exclusively reported “Barbie” would be campaigned for best original screenplay for the upcoming awards season rather than in adapted screenplay as had been presumed. The decision brought about some interesting debate on social media, and even some Academy members contacted me directly with questions and opinions about it. But it’s not a black-or-white question. The categories in which a movie competes aren’t always as clear as you’d think, as seen through the history of nominees and winners.

Let’s start with the existing definitions. What does it mean to be an original script vs. an adapted one? As most people know, an original work creates an entirely new narrative, while an adapted one transforms pre-existing material into a screenplay.

“Barbie” scribes Greta Gerwig...

I honestly never expected Steven Spielberg in a Criterion Channel series––certainly not one that pairs him with Kogonada, anime, and Johnny Mnemonic––but so’s the power of artificial intelligence. Perhaps his greatest film (at this point I don’t need to tell you the title) plays with After Yang, Ghost in the Shell, and pre-Matrix Keanu in July’s aptly titled “AI” boasting also Spike Jonze’s Her, Carpenter’s Dark Star, and Computer Chess. Much more analog is a British Noir collection obviously carrying the likes of Odd Man Out, Night and the City, and The Small Back Room, further filled by Joseph Losey’s Time Without Pity and Basil Dearden’s It Always Rains on Sunday. (No two ways about it: these movies have great titles.) An Elvis retrospective brings six features, and the consensus best (Don Siegel’s Flaming Star) comes September 1.

While Isabella Rossellini...

All those British crime films once deemed undesirable for the National Image are beginning to get the attention they deserve. This story of a single day in a working class section of London has plenty of criminal activity but blends it in with the everyday crimes of desperation and boredom. The Sandigate girls are flirting with trouble but Googie Withers’ Rose Sandigate has gone much further: she’s hiding an escaped fugitive who was once her lover in the vain hope of recapturing her lost youth. Director Robert Hamer examines a dozen distinctive characters on the edge of respectability, in one of the most original ‘Brit noirs’ we’ve seen to date.

It Always Rains on Sunday

Blu-ray

Kl Studio Classics

1947 / B&w / 1:37 Academy / 92 min. / Street Date November 5, 2019 / available through Kino Lorber / 24.95

Starring: Googie Withers, John McCallum, Jack Warner, Edward Chapman, Susan Shaw, Patricia Plunkett, Nigel Stock, David Lines, Sydney Tafler,...

In film history, the anthology genre is the most challenging. Episodic films often have several directors and screenwriters which gives them an inconsistent tone and quality. But the genre’s pitfalls haven’t stopped such filmmakers including Akira Kurosawa (“Dreams”), the Coens (“The Ballad of Buster Scruggs”), Frank Miller and Robert Rodriguez (“Sin City”); Woody Allen, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese (“New York Stories”); and Joe Dante, John Landis, George Miller and Steven Spielberg (“Twilight Zone: The Movie”).

Wes Anderson joined them with his latest film “The French Dispatch,” which received a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival. The comedy brings to life three stories from an American magazine published in a fictional French city and features his stock company of actors including Bill Murray, Jason Schwartzman, Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson.

If you are a fan of the genre, here are the best anthology movies that...

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...

Rafiki Welcome to this week's round-up of films to catch on telly and streaming services, don't forget to check out our latest Streaming Spotlight, which is all about dinosaur movies.

Pink String And Sealing Wax, Talking Pictures TV (Freeview Channel 81), Wednesday, June 24, 3.15pm

Robert Hamer would go on to direct comedy classic Kind Hearts And Coronets, but he started his career with this darker mix of comedy and melodrama. Although its shifting tone takes a bit of getting used to, this is well worth watching for Googie Withers' commanding central turn as a pub landlady who is desperate to escape the clutches of her drunken husband and who settles on an innocent mark (an almost impossibly young Gordon Jackson) to help her execute her poisonous plan. Although Withers' Pearl is a conniving, she's also shown to be a victim of circumstance as the film scrutinises the patriarchy not just...

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“Ealing Goes Scottish”

By Raymond Benson

The famous British studio, Ealing, made many kinds of pictures and became a major force in the U.K.’s film industry, especially after producer Michael Balcon took it over. While the studio had already made a few comedies, for some reason in the late 1940s it started producing more of them. The natures of these comedies shifted and became more intelligent, dry, and focused on underdog characters who valiantly attempt to overcome a series of obstacles. Sometimes the protagonists are successful—and sometimes not. Along the way, though, a series of misadventures occur. They range from “amusing” to “riotously funny.” It all worked, and the Ealing Comedies became a sub-genre unto themselves, especially when they starred the likes of Alec Guinness, Alastair Sim, or Stanley Holloway.

The year 1949 is generally considered the beginning of the run,...

Staring down his prey with sunken eyes and a sinister smile, Alastair Sim was the fiend Charles Addams never got around to drawing. Sim was a quick-change artist who didn’t need makeup to transform from a grasping monster into your favorite uncle – it’s why he remains the greatest interpreter of Ebenezer Scrooge. Whether playing a cold-blooded assassin in The Green Man or a kindly army chaplain in Folly to be Wise he understood as well as anyone why the masks of tragedy and comedy are intertwined.

Sim is one of those figures who’s been consigned to the history books for decades. But by releasing a Blu ray set of the great man’s comedies in 2020, Film Movement Classics, like Scrooge, hasn’t lost their senses – they’ve come to them.

Alastair Sim’s School for Laughter

Blu ray

Film Movement Classics

1954, ’60, ’51, ’47 / 1.67:1, 1.37:1 / 86, 97, 93, 82 min.

Starring Alastair Sim,...

Dead of Night

Blu ray

Kino Lorber

1945 / 1.33 : 1 / 102 Min.

Starring Mervyn Johns, Michael Redgrave, Googie Withers

Cinematography by Douglas Slocombe

Directed by Basil Dearden, Alberto Cavalcant, Charles Chrichton, Robert Hamer

Anthology films have been a reliable Hollywood staple since D.W. Griffith’s time-traveling Intolerance and Paramount’s depression-era dramedy If I Had a Million. The short story format has proved especially popular with horror movie fans who prefer their thrills lean, mean and straight to the point.

That humble subgenre contains multitudes – from Masaki Kobayashi‘s elegant Kwaidan to the comic book stylings of Freddie Francis’s Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors to the state of the art shocker Nightmare Cinema – but the great-granddaddy of them all is surely the 1945 classic from Britain’s Ealing Studios – Dead of Night.

Mervyn Johns, the eternal Everyman, plays Walter Craig, a restoration expert whose newest project – a provincial manor called “Pilgrim’s...

July 9th is bringing all kinds of horror-rific awesomeness our way with this week’s genre-related Blu-ray and DVD releases. Easily one of my most anticipated discs of this year, the new Silent Hill Collector’s Edition from Scream Factory heads home on Tuesday as well as Mill Creek’s stunning Steelbook for Mothra, which looks to be a must-have for any movie monster aficionados out there. In terms of recent films, both Pet Sematary (2019) and Claire Denis’ High Life are hitting various formats this week, and for you Andy Sidaris fans out there, Savage Beach is hitting Blu-ray as well.

Other releases for July 9th include Dead of Night, Division 19, This Island Earth, and Waterworld in 4K.

Dead of Night

A group of strangers, mysteriously gathered at an isolated country estate, recount chilling tales of the supernatural. First, a racer survives a brush with death only to receive...

Released in 1949, Kind Hearts and Coronets remains one of the all time classics of British cinema. As a 4k restoration is released for its 70th anniversary, we see actors Dennis Price, Alec Guinness and Joan Greenwood and director Robert Hamer at work

•Kind Hearts & Coronets is in UK cinemas on 7 June, and on DVD and Blu-Ray on 24 June...

Anthology films are almost by definition a mixed bag, and even when one of their sort garners strong critical acclaim, as the Coen Brothers’ The Ballad of Buster Scruggs did last November, most reactions end up settling into a “this story is better than this story” sort of comparison game. Horror anthologies tend to be even more wildly variant in quality within their individual films, and British production company Amicus Films released a string of them in the ‘60s to mid ‘70s– titles like Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, And Now the Screaming Starts, The House That Dripped Blood, Asylum and Tales That Witness Madness were a real hit-or-miss selection, with Amicus scoring highest when they adapted EC Comics stories into their big hits Tales from the Crypt (1972) and the follow-up Vault of Horror (1973).

But probably the best horror anthologies—Dead of Night (1945), an atypically creepy release from Britain’s Ealing Studios,...

Sixty years on, the big-screen adaptation of the landmark play looks more conservative than revolutionary but Burton’s firepower is undimmed

John Osborne’s theatre of cruelty and misery exploded on to the English stage in 1956. Look Back in Anger was adapted for the movie screen three years later by veteran writer and Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale and directed by Tony Richardson. It now has a cinema rerelease, and maybe what it reminded me of right away was Robert Hamer’s It Always Rains on Sunday. In this film, it always seems to be Sunday, and it’s raining. The sheer choking sadness of the postwar British Sabbath is what comes across here most immediately – its meteorology of gloom. There’s nothing to do but feel listless and angry and read the raucous but somehow insidiously depressing Sunday newspapers. And the nastiness and casual racism of 1950s Britain is exposed...

Filtered through her experience as an unequalled comic performer, writer-director Elaine May scores a bulls-eye with this grossly underappreciated gem, fashioned in a style that could be called ‘black comedy lite.’ And that’s the release version mangled by the producer. What might it have been if May had been allowed to finish her director’s cut?

A New Leaf Olive Signature

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1971 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date December 5, 2017 / available through the Olive Films website / 29.99

Starring: Walter Matthau, Elaine May, Jack Weston, George Rose, James Coco, Doris Roberts, Renée Taylor, William Redfield, David Doyle.

Cinematography: Gayne Rescher

Original Music: Neal Hefti

Written by Elaine May from a story by Jack Ritchie

Produced by Hilliard Elkins, Howard W. Koch, Joseph Manduke

Directed by Elaine May

Olive’s next title up for Signature Collection status is A New Leaf, the directing debut of comedienne-writer Elaine May. It’s certainly a worthy title.

After polling critics from around the world for the greatest American films of all-time, BBC has now forged ahead in the attempt to get a consensus on the best comedies of all-time. After polling 253 film critics, including 118 women and 135 men, from 52 countries and six continents a simple, the list of the 100 greatest is now here.

Featuring canonical classics such as Some Like It Hot, Dr. Strangelove, Annie Hall, Duck Soup, Playtime, and more in the top 10, there’s some interesting observations looking at the rest of the list. Toni Erdmann is the most recent inclusion, while the highest Wes Anderson pick is The Royal Tenenbaums. There’s also a healthy dose of Chaplin and Lubitsch with four films each, and the recently departed Jerry Lewis has a pair of inclusions.

Check out the list below (and my ballot) and see more on their official site.

100. (tie) The King of Comedy (Martin Scorsese,...

(Alexander Mackendrick, 1955; StudioCanal, U, DVD/Blu-ray)

Ealing Studio’s two greatest directors, Robert Hamer and Alexander Mackendrick, both made near flawless black comedies on the state of the nation starring Alec Guinness and involving multiple murders, and there is little to choose between the former’s Kind Hearts and Coronets and the latter’s The Ladykillers, a special edition of which is being released this week to mark its 60th anniversary.

The heist (or caper) movie began with The Great Train Robbery in 1903, and enjoyed its classic decade in America and Europe between John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and Basil Dearden’s The League of Gentlemen (1960). The greatest comic example is The Ladykillers.

Continue reading...

Special Mention: Misery

Directed by Rob Reiner

Screenplay by William Goldman

1990, USA

Genre: Thriller

Elevated by standout performances from James Caan and Kathy Bates, Misery remains one of the best Stephen King adaptations to date. Director Rob Reiner is clearly more interested in the dark humour and humanity than the gory detail in King’s novel, but make no mistake about it, Misery is a tough watch soaked in sharp dialogue, a brooding atmosphere, and disturbing bodily harm inflicted on James Caan by sweet old Kathy Bates. I can still feel his pain.

129. Black Sabbath (Three Faces of Fear)

Mario Bava and Salvatore Billitteri

Written by Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei

Italy 1960 / Italy 1963

Genre: Horror Anthology

Not to be confused with Black Sunday, Black Sabbath is a horror anthology composed of three atmospheric tales. “The Drop of Water” concerns a nurse who steals a ring off a corpse, only...

Cohen Media Group beautifully restores Alfred Hitchcock’s 1939 title Jamaica Inn. A title worthy of reconsideration, considered by many to be an inferior work from the master of suspense, even from the director himself, it’s a definite gem, particularly for fans of Charles Laughton. The actor, whose production company basically commandeered the production, gives a swarthy, deliciously overwrought performance. It’s a standout in a career already filled with such distinction. The film also serves as the film debut of the beautiful Maureen O’Hara, here playing a glorified damsel in distress.

The narrative is relatively simple, set around 1800 as young Irish lass Mary (O’Hara) makes a surprise visit to the Cornish coast to visit her Aunt Patience (Marie Ney) following the death of her mother. Patience lives with Mary’s uncle Joss (Leslie Banks, who vies with Laughton for greatest scene chewer), a man that provides the...

Best British movies of all time? (Image: a young Michael Caine in 'Get Carter') Ten years ago, Get Carter, starring Michael Caine as a dangerous-looking London gangster (see photo above), was selected as the United Kingdom's very best movie of all time according to 25 British film critics polled by Total Film magazine. To say that Mike Hodges' 1971 thriller was a surprising choice would be an understatement. I mean, not a David Lean epic or an early Alfred Hitchcock thriller? What a difference ten years make. On Total Film's 2014 list, published last May, Get Carter was no. 44 among the magazine's Top 50 best British movies of all time. How could that be? Well, first of all, people would be very naive if they took such lists seriously, whether we're talking Total Film, the British Film Institute, or, to keep things British, Sight & Sound magazine. Second, whereas Total Film's 2004 list was the result of a 25-critic consensus,...

Alec Guinness, who died in the summer of 2000, would have turned 100 on April 2. "Late but loyal," as Anthony Lane puts it in the New Yorker, Film Forum is running a centenary tribute from today through July 3. The Voice's Stephanie Zacharek notes that "all of the usual suspects" are here, the Ealing comedies, the six films Guinness made with David Lean—and the series' opener, Robert Hamer's Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949). » - David Hudson...

There are no new horror tropes or postmodern twists, but this psychodrama induces an unpleasant atmosphere of fear

Mike Flanagan had been an unfamiliar name to me before seeing this film – but this editor-writer-director is clearly a scary movie auteur to be reckoned with. Oculus is a variation on traditional horror themes, perhaps chiefly John Carpenter's Halloween and Robert Hamer's haunted mirror sequence in the 1945 Ealing Studios portmanteau classic, Dead of Night. It is, in fact, a feature-length development of a short Flanagan made in 2006. Nothing very self-consciously new is being done with these horror tropes, and there are no postmodern twists. It's just that Flanagan (with co-writers Jeff Seidman and Jeff Howard) contrives a piercingly unpleasant atmosphere of fear. Karen Gillan stars as Kaylie, whose brother Tim (Brenton Thwaites) has just been released from a mental facility, deemed to be sane and safe after a horrific episode in their childhood.

April Fools! I needed an infamous 'bad movie we love' for today's edition of Hit Me With Your Best Shot a crowd source visual party, where anyone with a love for movies can watch the pre-assigned film and chime in on the one moment that makes it or defines it or reflects it. In other words, whatever "best" means to you.

The Village People musical Can't Stop the Music (1980) starring Valerie Perrine (of Lenny & Superman fame), Olympian Bruce Jenner (long before the Kardashian days) and Steve Guttenberg early on in his career, came through. And how. You can barely believe this movie while you're watching it but you can't exactly look away either. (Credit where it's due, the lightbulb for this week's selection came to mia via an e-mail from Awards Watch, about their new series pairing Razzie winners with Oscar winners.)

This musical, the very first Razzie Worst Picture winner is awful,...

(Alberto Cavalcanti, Charles Crichton, Basil Dearden, Robert Hamer, 1945, Studiocanal, PG)

Portmanteau movies became an established form in 1916 when one of its greatest examples, Dw Griffith's Intolerance, interweaving four stories reaching from ancient Babylon to the early 20th century, was released. They've been appearing ever since, covering a variety of subjects (a shared author, a theme, a genre, a setting), the greatest number produced in the 1950s and 60s when it was a useful device for bringing international moviemakers together.

The greatest portmanteau film came from Ealing Studios and was a collaboration between four staff directors, one celebrated (the Brazilian-born Cavalcanti) and three soon to become well known. It took as its subject the British ghost story or tale of the supernatural, was written by a variety of hands, and went into production in that curious period between D-Day and the end of the last war, though there's no explicit reference to the war.

Jean Kent: British film star and ‘Last of the Gainsborough Girls’ dead at 92 (photo: actress Jean Kent in ‘Madonna of the Seven Moons’) News outlets and tabloids — little difference these days — have been milking every little drop from the unexpected and violent death of The Fast and the Furious franchise actor Paul Walker, and his friend and business partner Roger Rodas this past Saturday, November 30, 2013. Unfortunately — and unsurprisingly — apart from a handful of British publications, the death of another film performer on that same day went mostly underreported. If you’re not "in" at this very moment, you may as well have never existed. Jean Kent, best known for her roles as scheming villainesses in British films of the 1940s and Gainsborough Pictures’ last surviving top star, died on November 30 at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds, England. The previous day, she had suffered a fall at her...

Every year, we here at Sound On Sight celebrate the month of October with 31 Days of Horror; and every year, I update the list of my favourite horror films ever made. Last year, I released a list that included 150 picks. This year, I’ll be upgrading the list, making minor alterations, changing the rankings, adding new entries, and possibly removing a few titles. I’ve also decided to publish each post backwards this time for one reason: the new additions appear lower on my list, whereas my top 50 haven’t changed much, except for maybe in ranking. I am including documentaries, short films and mini series, only as special mentions – along with a few features that can qualify as horror, but barely do.

Come Back Tonight To See My List Of The 200 Best!

****

Special Mention:

Wait until Dark

Directed by Terence Young

Written by Robert Carrington

USA, 1967

Directed by Terence Young,...

Barbican, London

A season of films about London reveals how fog, rain and gloom of all kinds add to the mystique of the capital

I've been told that London's reputation for fog is not only due to the fact that it used to be foggy. It was also because cash-strapped postwar film-makers found it convenient to shroud their scenes in mist because they wouldn't have to build so much of the set – just one or two house fronts instead of a street. If this story is an urban myth, no matter, as it tells a truth about London on film. The city's greatest gift to the movie camera is its atmospherics, its fog, rain and darkness.

In ordinary daylight it is obstinately factual. If cinema likes to make cities into dream versions of themselves, London doesn't join in. The brick terraces, the railings, pavements, bollards and postboxes remain themselves. They...

Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...

Sherlock Holmes might be sexier, but Gk Chesterton's atmospheric Father Brown stories are the best the genre has ever seen

If there is debate about who is the greatest literary detective, there can be no dispute as to who is the most recognisable. An IMDb search for adaptations of Gk Chesterton's Father Brown stories yields one 1950s film, two television series (one of which has just started on BBC1), a clutch of American Masterpiece Mystery shows, and an American TV movie. A similar hunt for Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes turns up an immediate 200 hits, with many more following: there's Young Sherlock, Robert Downey Jr, Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeremy Brett, Basil Rathbone and Billy Wilder, as well as the Baker Street Irregulars, all the spoofs, the debunkings, the modernisations, and so on and on. Even Tom and Jerry have met Holmes.

The reasons for Holmes's on-screen triumph over the diminutive...

To start the New Year, every day in January we will be publishing another section of our 300 Greatest Films Ever Made List. This list was compiled over a two-year period using a variety of criteria, including--popularity, critical response, box office take, influence, originality and awards won. Thanks to all the people who helped in making this list by giving their feedback over blogs and hubs during the period it was being compiled. And now, on with the list…

Numbers 300-291

300) Kind Hearts And Coronets (1949) Robert Hamer British

299) The Girl With A Pearl Earring (2003) Peter Webber British

298) The Green Mile (1999) Frank Darabont USA

297) The Matrix (1999) The Wachowski Brothers USA

296) The Red Shoes (1948) Michael Powell British

295) The Right Stuff (1983) Philip Kaufman USA

294) Blow Up (1966) Michelangelo Antonioni British/Italian

293) Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) Ang Lee Hong Kong/Taiwan

292) Greed (1925) Eric Von Stroheim USA Silent

291) Halloween (1978) John Cartenter USA

Numbers 290-281 next....

FILMMAKINGfilm cultureclassic...

★★★★☆ Coinciding with the BFI's Ealing: Light and Dark season, It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) - given a pristine digital restoration by the National Archive - stands as a remarkable example of the films Ealing made that were somewhat overshadowed by their more popular, overtly comedic titles. Directed by Robert Hamer (who went on to helm perhaps the studio's most acclaimed feature, 1949's Kind Hearts and Coronets) and based on the novel of the same name by Arthur La Bern, the film is a soapy kitchen sink crime drama set amongst the working-class denizens of East London, and tells a tale of hidden desire suppressed by societal conformity.

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By Pd Smith

In this scholarly but lively survey of British crime films from the 1940s to the present day, Forshaw tracks down the ways in which the genre has offered "keen insights into the society of the day". Films such as Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) present an "unvarnished picture of crime and lives lived in quiet desperation", while the more recent Kidulthood (2005) by Noel Clarke shows that "alienated, disenfranchised youth" remains as central to the genre as in the 50s. From police corruption, dealt with in David Greene's The Strange Affair (1968), to paedophilia – the subject of Cyril Frankel's Never Take Sweets from a Stranger (1960) – crime films have consistently tackled subjects that mainstream film-makers have avoided: it is, argues Forshaw, "the cinema of the unacceptable". He considers class divisions, sexual taboos, censorship, corporate crime and violence, as well as the "grimly urban" settings of many of the films,...

Skyfall (12A)

(Sam Mendes, 2012, UK/Us) Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Judi Dench, 143 mins

It starts with a bang, but ends with a poignant whimper. This is supposedly a smarter Bond, you see, giving you first-class action and breathtaking imagery, but also a Freudian look into the secret agent's psyche. A pity, then, that the plot is utter nonsense. Bardem's Joker-ish baddie isn't interested in world domination; he has a personal score to settle, and an unfeasibly cunning plan…

Elena (12A)

(Andrey Zvyagintsev, 2011, Rus) Nadezhda Markina, Andrey Smirnov. 109 mins

The Return director finds form with a penetrating look at class resentment in money-obsessed modern Russia, perfect conditions for a noir-ish drama. Markina is magnificent as a hard-up divorcee, who does what she has to when her wealthy partner begins to ail.

Room 237 (15)

(Rodney Ascher, 2012, Us) 102 mins

This investigation into the myriad interpretations of Kubrick's The Shining goes far deeper than anyone needed,...

★★★★☆ A key part of the BFI's Ealing: Light and Dark season and rereleased this Friday, Robert Hamer's It Always Rains on Sunday (1947) is a much-underrated kitchen sink crime drama set over one dreary Sunday, telling a tale of working-class life set within London's East End. Based on the novel by Arthur La Bernby, the story concerns the family life of Rose Sandgate (Googie Withers), a typical East End housewife married to the much older George (Edward Chapman) and living with his two young daughter Vi (Susan Shaw) and Doris (Patricia Plunkett) and their own young son, Alfie (David Lines).

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Kind Hearts director Robert Hamer shows the same masterly ensemble control two years earlier in this East End melodrama

Robert Hamer's brilliant, brittle melodrama of London's East End, originally released in 1947, came out two years before his masterpiece Kind Hearts and Coronets. It shows the same masterly ensemble control. The film is in many ways a precursor to kitchen-sink movies like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning – and that huge, teeming market scene bears comparison with Carné's Les Enfants du Paradis. It follows a typical Sunday in a working-class neighbourhood. It's raining of course, but there's nothing dull and Sunday-ish about what's going to happen. Googie Withers is Rose, a former barmaid who has settled for marriage with a dull but steady widower with children. Handsome escaped convict Tommy Swann (John McCallum) turns up in their garden shed, pleading for help: she and Tommy were once sweethearts and his reappearance...

Catch up with the last seven days in the world of film

The big story

We tried. Oh God, how we tried. But, like an army of zombies in the night, Skyfall just keeps coming. No matter how hard you stick your fingers in your ears, however loud you screech "La-la-la" - it won't be denied. There's only one game in town this week, and it's wearing a dapper tuxedo. The premiere on Tuesday night lured scores of celebrity faces to the Albert Hall while the film's actors – Daniel Craig and Naomie Harris among them – talked about what it was like cavorting for Sam Mendes.

Mendes himself mentioned he wouldn't be averse to doing another 007 film, if he was asked back, while Guy Lodge examined in detail Skyfall's awesome way with product placement and marketing.

We even had room for Jonathan Freedland's amusing account of his

regular trips to get his Bond fix,...

Throughout the month of October, Editor-in-Chief and resident Horror expert Ricky D, will be posting a list of his favorite Horror films of all time. The list will be posted in six parts. Click here to see every entry.

As with all lists, this is personal and nobody will agree with every choice – and if you do, that would be incredibly disturbing. It was almost impossible for me to rank them in order, but I tried and eventually gave up.

****

Special Mention:

American Psycho

Directed by Mary Harrron

Written by Mary Harron

2000, USA

Bret Easton Ellis’s dark and violent satire of America in the 1980s was brought to the big screen by director Mary Harron. Initially slapped with the MPAA’s kiss of death (an Nc-17 rating), American Psycho was later re-edited and reduced to a more commercially dependable “R”. Perhaps the film works best as a slick satire about misogyny,...

It always rained for the Ealing Studios director, but with the reissue of a lost noir classic, it's time his talent was recognised

Robert Hamer was the odd man out at Ealing Studios. He wasn't the only falling-down drunk there, and I daresay he wasn't the only unhappily closeted homosexual, but his work as a writer and director has a sharpness and bite lacking in the genial comedies we associate with the studio.

The revival of Hamer's almost forgotten kitchen sink noir classic from 1947, It Always Rains On Sunday, may come as a shock to those who know Hamer only through his comic masterpiece Kind Hearts And Coronets. Kind Hearts lacks exactly that titular quality, being a spiritedly mean-minded account of multiple murder by a spurned minor aristocrat. Likewise Hamer's last film, School For Scoundrels, which was completed by others as Hamer was by then often battling terrifying Dt hallucinations.

Pitt was one of a number of A–listers voicing forthright opinions in the last few days

The big story

"My drug days have long since passed," said Brad Pitt in an interview this week. "But I could probably land in any American city and within 24 hours find whatever you want."

His comments came during a promotional stint for The House I Live In. The Pitt–produced documentary suggests that efforts by the Us government to fight drug trafficking are doomed to failure, and that a new approach should be adopted.

Labeling the Us "war on drugs" as a "charade," he said: "It's a backward strategy. It makes no sense and we keep going on the path like we're winning, when it perpetuates more drugs being used."

The actor has made no secret of his former drug use. Earlier this year he told the Guardian that he made the decision...

By Robert Hamer

HollywoodNews.com: Since Ang Lee’s involvement was first announced, Life of Pi had been near – if not at – the top of nearly every Oscar prediction on the web (including from yours truly). With the first trailer hitting the web this morning, buzz no doubt will only intensify from here.

In case you’ve been out of the loop for the past several months, Lee’s latest is an adaptation of the 2001 bestseller about a young man stranded on a lifeboat with a tiger that ends up being about God and the meaning of life as seen through the myriad viewpoints of Christianity, Islam and Hinduism.

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A classic 1960s working-class drama translates beautifully into a comedy of contemporary British Asian family life

All in Good Time is a touching, likable comedy of life in Lancashire's Hindu community. Though this aspect is little publicised, it's closely based on Bill Naughton's 1965 play of the same title.

Born in Ireland and raised in Bolton, Naughton emerged as a novelist and playwright in the late 50s in the wave of northern working-class writers like Shelagh Delaney, Keith Waterhouse, Alan Sillitoe, David Storey and Stan Barstow. But having been born in 1910 and worked for years as a coal-bagger, cotton-loom operator and lorry driver, Naughton belonged to an earlier generation and was altogether less chippy, aggressive, and self-consciously political about his background.

He enjoyed considerable success in the theatre and had three of his plays filmed, though his most enduringly popular work, the film version of Alfie, completely misrepresented Naughton's radio play,...

Today sees the opening of "The Cabin In The Woods," one of the freshest, most enjoyable horror movies in years, one that we can only urge you to go see (read our review here). To mark its release, Time Out have polled critics, programmers and filmmakers as to their favorite horror movies, and collated their finds in a mammoth list.

Topped by "The Exorcist," it's an excellent read, and one you'll want to sit down with over the weekend, and as a taste, below you can find the top ten picks of ten of the most notable filmmaker contributors. You can find the full list, as well as picks from many, many more interesting figures, from Antonio Campos and Joe Dante to Simon Pegg and Rob Zombie, over at Time Out's site. And why not weigh in with your own ten picks over in the comments below?

Roger Corman ("The Pit & The Pendulum,...

Something nice happened to us while we were preparing the schedule for Ebertfest 2012, which plays April 25-29 at the Virginia Theater (above) in Champaign-Urbana, Ill. We'd invited Patton Oswalt to attend with his "Big Fan. He agreed and went one additional step: "I'd like to personally choose a film to show to the students, and discuss it." That sounded to me like a splendid idea, embodying the spirit of this festival, which combines the love of good films with volunteerism. This is a rare festival where no business takes place. No films are bought or sold. No deals are signed. It's simplicity itself: We join in a classic 1920 palace, 1,600 of us, and watch a film as it should be seen, on a vast screen with perfect sound. Then we talk about them afterwards. The festival and the theater come to us through the work of countless volunteers from the University and the community of Champaign-Urbana.