Mummy! Masterful screen terror as bad-girl-on-the-lam Janet Leigh picks the wrong place to spend the night. Scalpel-sharp edits, leering camerawork and Bernard Herrmann’s killer score max out the fear-factor in Hitchcock’s seminal black-and-white shocker. Three-mile queues were reported at some drive-in theatres when it debuted in 1960. It’s still not safe to go back in the water.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Megamind critic David Thomson called Hitchcock “an inventor of thumbscrews”. In this twisted, diabolical love story, they’re firmly on Ingrid Bergman. She plays a booze-sozzled floozy forced to marry nice-Nazi Claude Rains to help the man she really loves - shadowy American agent Cary Grant. A creamy-smooth suspenser with an inky heart of darkness, it’s Hitchcock’s most stylish dose of poisonous eroticism and arch misogyny. Nazis, alcoholism, sexual favours, blackmail… What’s not to like? Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 1% [?]
Yes, you saw the train go into that tunnel… Cheeky. Hitch sexes up the thriller genre with this knockout whisk of suspense, wit and style, sending Mad-man Cary Grant (the original Don Draper) pegging it cross-country with spies (who think he’s a double agent) and the police (who think he’s an assassin) hot on his arse. Classic scenes a-go-go – the crop-dusting plane and Mount Rushmore face-chase are rightly iconic – and brilliantly scripted by the late, great Ernest Lehman, who delivers a strolling commentary on this disc. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 2% [?]
Look closer… Vertigo’s sick little brother sees snoop reporter Jimmy Stewart stuck in a wheelchair with nothing to do but waggle his long lens at the neighbours. Has he discovered a murder? Should he get involved? Should we? Too late, already. With the camera locked inside Stewart’s room for the entire film, Hitchcock’s chilling essay on voyeurism (read: movie-going) stares right back at you. Meaning? Rear Window is the definitive guilty-pleasure movie. Watch it in a double-bill with Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, then go for counseling. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 3% [?]
One setting. Eight people. Lots and lots of aggro. Hitchcock’s sloshy wartime thriller anticipates Big Brother’s Darwinian bear-pit by 50 years and ups the ante with eviction-by-drowning. Memo to Channel Four?
Like Rope (one apartment, no cuts) and Rear Window (one apartment, no legs), it’s one of the fatman’s most memorable experiments in phonebox cinema: the survivors of a sunk luxury-liner trapped on row-boat in the Atlantic with the German U-Boat Captain (Walter Slezak) who torpedoed them. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 3% [?]
Or: Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Hitchcock, But Were Afraid To Ask. And you should be afraid. Hitchcock’s greatest film, his most autobiographical film, is his blackest. Talk about falling in love: retired copper Jimmy Stewart can’t let go of the woman (Kim Novak) he’s been hired to tail and ends up taking a slo-mo tumble through the cracks in his own mind – taking her with him. A mesmerising view of human obsession, desire, guilt and exploitation – in which, most terrifyingly, love is the true MacGuffin. Wordless for most of its length, it gets deeper and darker with every viewing. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 5% [?]
Grim, bilious and maddeningly unsurprising, Tim Burton’s journey down the rabbit-hole Frankensteins together severed portions of two Alice books and Lewis Carroll’s epic poem Jabberwocky but ends up missing… what? Its “muchness”? Dodging a corset and a snooty suitor in the tedious intro, Alice (Defiance starlet Mia Wasikowska) is now a 19-year-old runaway bride who grapples with her own bodily changes and ill-fitting clothes before donning a suit of armour, decapitating a dragon and drinking its blood. This isn’t Uncle Walt’s Wonderland, for sure. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 5% [?]
Shot like a miraculously preserved old photograph, told like a great novel by its elderly narrator some 40 years later, The White Ribbon
An invisible tripwire lashed between two trees sends a doctor crashing off his horse – and that mysterious ‘accident’ is just the start of the strange and increasingly terrible crimes in a quiet German village on the brink of World War One. Pets are killed, cabbages are beheaded, women are humiliated. But again and again, it’s the kids who get it bad. Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 12% [?]
Neil Armstrong pulls a last-second eject before his malfunctioning lunar mobile crashes on to the runway below and disappears in a ball of flame. Apollo 14’s Alan Shepard takes out a club and starts playing golf on surface of the moon. One of the Hubble telescope’s discarded solar panels drifts away into abyss of space like a giant, shimmering manta ray. Highlights? Pick ‘em… Read the rest of this entry »
Popularity: 17% [?]
“Aaaaah! Aaa-aaa-aaa-aaaah! One day we will find, the Ciiities of Gold!” Today is that day. Two decades after dazzling pre-Akira audiences on the BBC, the great lost anime of the ‘80s emerges on a six-disc DVD set
Popularity: 15% [?]
Jonathan Crocker is a freelance journalist based in London. Having previously been a commissioning editor at Total Film, Men’s Health and Time Out, Jonathan also contributes to publications including i-D magazine, ShortList, Little White Lies, TheLondonPaper and Wired. He is available for commissions: contact here!
