Nick's Film Jottings

Another interesting film from Siodmak, this one firmly rooted in the Italian community of New York. Arrogant criminal Richard Conte has kill...

A melancholy film, shot on location in seedy Notting Hill, then quite a dangerous place. Leslie Caron is a young and pregnant French girl wh...

Eric Ambler's screenplay - based on Ray Allister (aka Muriel Forth)'s biography - begins at the end of inventor Willy Freise-Greene...

A lovely film, Theo's best. Bill Murray was beginning to make me think of Beat Takeshi a bit in that they're both quite impassive......

Menno Mayjes adapted Alice Walker's novel (she was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize), a novel which has frequently b...

Izzy and Billy's screenplay is based on Ferenc Molnar's play, so the solid structure is already there. It's what they do within ...

What makes a great film? Well, first of all you need a great story, and a great screenplay (these two are not the same thing). Then you need...

A familiar deadpan tale of the Yakuza, and a turf war being fought in Okinawa. Then the gang hide out at the beach, and things start taking ...

Toby Jones is fantastic as Truman Capote and the film runs deeper then we remembered - he seems to lose his heart to convicted murderer Dani...

Jonathan Latimer adapted Dashiel Hammett's 1931 novel. Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are reteamed after the same year's  This Gun For ...

I don't know what's happened to Susanne Bier, she used to be great - see The Bald Hairdresser , or The Night Manager . But since tha...

September 2013: Julia Stiles, Heath Ledger (not really looking happy, though I loved the improv bum smack when the cops are after him), Jose...

What's with the no headlights? All the cars have funny little sidelights. I presume it's some sort of deal with rationing, but it...

Also Frances McDormand's debut. Joel and Ethan wrote it and it's clearly a descendant of film noir  - the moment the car won't s...

Burt Lancaster punches a man in a pub who falls and dies.. he goes on the run and takes shelter in the flat of Joan Fontaine. But dodgy bast...