Lost Highway tells about a man, who after murdering his wife in a jealous fit (apparently chopping her up in pieces), experiences some sort of panic attack, unable to cope with his actions. David Lynch has compared the man to “O.J. Simpson going in a psychogenic fugue”. Such process of cognitive disassociation can occur after traumatic events, leading a person to suddenly lose awareness of who and where he is. This deranged figure can straddle away from home, unable to…
Mid-nineties.
I must have been fifteen going on sixteen, feeling very cool and grown-up. After long grumbling and extended negotiations with my mam, I was finally allowed to go see the new film of that rising, talk-of-the-town director, Quentin Tarantino. Providing that I would take my older brother with me. (My mother was a real cinephile, but not entirely sure what to make of Tarantino, who at the time was vilified as a morally corrupting influence on the youth by…
Well, this was an insipid affaire.
Hitchcock might be forgiven for turning out this turd, but that’s still what it is. The movie was quickly rushed into production, being his very last obligation for Gainsborough Pictures - his heart and mind clearly already set on his next project. Hitchcock couldn’t wait to get this picture over with, since British International Pictures had offered the “hottest” director in England a new lucrative contract, more production resources, and, above all, more…
With The Lodger, young and aspiring director Alfred Hitchcock had scored his first critical and commercial success. Personally as well, he finally felt confident enough to ask for the hand of Alma Reville - his life-long love and creative partner, who, especially in those early days, was a critical factor behind the director’s rise to stardom.
Hitchcock’s career, however, doesn’t read as a neat, linear narrative, where one masterpiece is followed by yet another - crocheted together like…
The year is still young, but Poor Things might possibly become the best new film I will see this year. It’s in any case one of the most original and formally daring pictures I’ve seen in a long time.
Being a creative steampunk mashup of such nineteenth-century classics as Alice in Wonderland and the Frankenstein-mythos, the movie succeeds where Barbie failed: being a biting, satirical critique on patriarchal values and power inequalities, yet without becoming preachy or morally superficial.
The big star…
Upon its release, The Lodger was considered “the finest British production ever made”. Hitchcock himself believed it to be the first film where he truly found his style and tone. The screenplay, to start with, was - typically enough - based on a suspense story, fictionalising the grisly murders of Jack the Ripper in fog-filled London. Hitchcock knew about the eponymous novel, and the theater play based upon it, and picked it out himself to be made into…
