Married couple Peggy Cummins and Donald Sinden inherit £30,000 and a huge house from Cummins' late and quite odd Aunt Christabelle. The couple have
no money, and due to the oddity of the will, the only way to gain the money is to divorce. Instead of immediately following the template of a classic American screwball comedy and getting to Reno, these Brits decide to take in lodgers. Obviously, the lodgers turn out to be strange or/and foreign (or in the…

American Gigolo is another of Paul Schrader's "God's lonely man" films. His quartet being Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper and The Walker. They are a fascinating set of films, as much for their flaws, as for their successes. They are character studies of opaque, egotistical demons, increasingly pathetic and less dangerous with age. They mirror Schrader himself, and his own career. American Gigolo is the second of quartet and the first directed by Schrader. The film is built around…

Warren Beatty's Reds has to be considered perhaps the most ambitious, frankly crazy, film released by mainstream Hollywood. It is, in 1981, a sympathetic, if critical, look at the 1917 Russian Revolution. The film focuses on the life and career of John Reed, the journalist and writer who wrote Ten Days That Shook the World. It mixes the personal and the political, spending a good deal of time looking at Reed's relationship with Louise Bryant (the amazing Diane Keaton, more…