May 20, 2022

Universal, 1939: we continue the saga of John Stahl's final years with the banker regime with When Tomorrow Comes, a frankly pro-labour romance, full of eccentric charm, that rewrites the fate of Irene Dunne's Back Street character while reuniting the actress with Charles Boyer after their success in Love Affair. Then...

May 13, 2022

At last we come to the Daniel Day-Lewis perhaps best known to cinephiles: the over-the-top monstrous patriarchs of Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York (2002) and Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood (2007). Working from a couple of the best viewings we've personally had of these movies, we discuss how Bill...

May 6, 2022

For our RKO 1939 episode, a Directed by Garson Kanin double feature: Bachelor Mother, starring Ginger Rogers as an unwed department store clerk accused of motherhood; and The Great Man Votes, starring John Barrymore as an alcoholic intellectual struggling to raise two children, including the most precocious child actor...

Apr 29, 2022

We return to our Daniel Day-Lewis Acteurist Oeuvre-view with 1996's The Crucible (directed by Nicholas Hytner with a screenplay by Arthur Miller, based on his 1953 play) and 1997's The Boxer, reuniting Day-Lewis with writer-director Jim Sheridan and writer Terry George from In the Name of the Father and returning to...

Apr 22, 2022

This week's Special Subject takes a look at Sex, Satire, and American Culture in Frank Tashlin's Artists and Models (1955), starring Jerry Lewis, Dean Martin, Shirley MacLaine, and Dorothy Malone, and in Billy Wilder's Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), starring Dean Martin, Kim Novak, Ray Walston, and Felicia Farr. Tashlin uses...