From the Terrace (1960 Mark Robson)

Long - I knew it would be. Filmmakers thought that colour and Cinemascope weren't enough to drag audiences away from television, everything had to be super-long as well.

Paul Newman is the surviving son of unloving, strict Leon Ames and alcoholic adulterer Myrna Loy (who sadly disappears from the film entirely). Wants to make it big. Marries Joanne Woodward, from a good family, though it turns out she's a slut who's soon cheating on him. In saving the life of the grandson of Felix Aylmer, Newman gets job for the financier but it helps ruin his marriage. Then he meets Ina Balin...

The leads are as good as you'd expect. With Elizabeth Allen, Barbara Eden, George Grizzard, Patrick O'Neal, Malcolm Atterbury, Ted de Corsia.

John O'Hara's novel adapted by Ernest Lehman, leaves things slightly inconclusively - has he lost his job? Were the photos printed? (At any rate he must still own his dad's steel mill?) Did Myrna Loy sober up? Still, most enjoyable.

Photographed by Leo Tover, scored by Elmer Bernstein and edited by Dorothy Spencer, who's in a dissolvey phase, though doesn't mind pulling off an audacious jump cut before the boy falls through the ice. 20th Century Fox.

Val Lewton - The Man in the Shadows (2007 Kent Jones & scr)

Useful documentary of the melancholy Lewton and his themes of war and repressed femininity. Born in Yalta, home of 'The Lady with the Dog', nephew of actress Alla Nazimova. Interesting on his use of less familiar actors, good contributions from his son. Narrated by Scorsese.

The Curse of the Cat People looks like the masterpiece we've yet to see.

Roger Corman and Robert Wise are among the contributors.

Everything I Know About Love (2022 Dolly Alderton)

She wrote the novel and is credited with writing it... but there's also a credit for 'Writer's Room'...

Emma Appleton (The Last Letter From Your Lover) and Bel Powley are childhood friends who move in to a London house, shared with Uni friends Aliyah Odoffin and Marli Siu (teacher). Appleton gets lucky with a job in TV (the 'reality' show 'Heirs and Graces') offered by Jill Halfpenny, less lucky with musician boyfriend Connor Finch, who's a bit of a twat (evidenced  by his film poster - House of Frankenstein - I mean, is that supposed to be cool or something?); Powley finds her first love with straight insurance guy Ryan Bown.

The girls fall out somewhat in the penultimate episode as Powley says she's leaving them to move in with her BF. The finale sees Appleton on her own and not enjoying New York - Greenwich Village no less - until she bumps into a guy who seems perfect for her. Almost the very ending is a beautifully written monologue from her mum, Sophie Thompson, that maybe the guy appealed to her so much because he's like her friend (who by the way has aged before her time - what 25 year old wants a salmon dish??)

7 x 45 Working Title for BBC. Directed by China Moo-Young and Julia Foster. Looked very much like it was set up for Season 2. We thought it was most successful, well acted - the girls are a bit much sometimes.

Sorry Wrong Number (1948 Anatole Litvak)

Barbara Stanwyck, a bed bound hypochondriac, receives a crossed line telephone call which seems to announce a murder - it takes her a while to figure out it's her own. Lucille Fletcher adapted her own radio play, which was filmed before for television in 1946, with Mildred Natwick.

Then we flash back a lot, to see how she got together with Burt Lancaster, taking him away from Ann Richards, and how doctor Wendall Corey, chemist Harold Vermilyea and gangster William Conrad are involved. With Ed Begley as Stanwyck's father.

It's funny how the calls she keeps making and receiving are hindered by background noise of one sort or another.

Sol Polito's camera prowls around beautifully - he gets the rare solo credit that you usually only see with Gregg Toland - but credit to his operator and focus puller too. Powerful score by Franz Waxman.

A Paramount film. The ending is unusually bleak and surprising. Stanwyck was Oscar nominated.

The Undeclared War (2022 Peter Kosminsky)

It is 2024, and Russia has taken down the Internet with a cyber-attack. Workplace student at GCHQ Hannah Khalique-Brown joins the malware team and starts to crack the code. The way this is done is interestingly visual - she is walking down corridors, selecting doors, removing blockages, using tools, climbing... (Kosminsky started out making documentaries.)

She teams up with American Maisie Richardson to help, as well as a former decoder Mark Rylance. (Kosminsky also wrote and directed The Government Inspector.)

Meanwhile, we learn how a fellow student of hers Herman Segal ended up in Russia on the other side of the war, with newly acquired girlfriend Tinatin Dalakishvili.

Starts to sprawl - rigged elections, staged news, deep fakes. It ends in a rush of almost-war, like there's going to be a second season. And the murder (?) of the Rylance character seems particularly unexplored and elusive.

With Adrian Lester, Simon Pegg, Alex Jennings, Kerry Godliman, Edward Holcroft, Hattie Morahan, Ed Stoppard.

Some of the early scenes seem a bit stilted.

Think I've heard of what3words.com - tried it on our address and it was wrong! Seems a bit pointless though made a good plot device. Useful to be told FSB is the new KGB.

IWWAZ (1943 Jacques Tourneur)

It was 36°C today. There's quite a lot of opacity to this tale - Tom Conway's wife (Christine Gordon, her only performance) cannot be a zombie - yet when she is stabbed, she doesn't bleed. And what was going on with her - was she about to leave him for his brother, drunkard James Ellison?

Tourneur met Val Lewton when both were working for David Selznick on David Copperfield in 1935. When Lewton set up his mini-studio at RKO, producing that series of intelligent and atmospheric horror films, Tourneur was his first choice, and he directed Cat People, this and The Leopard Man, all of which are terrific - but for pure atmosphere, and its subtext of island culture and slavery, this one takes the cake. And eats it, if that doesn't scramble metaphors too badly.

Frances Dee is the nurse, Edith Barrett the enigmatic Mrs Rand. Sir Lancelot seems like a nice polite man, but when he finds Dee on her own, he's almost threatening her with his calypso (Q says warning). Theresa Harris is charming as the maid, Darby Jones memorable as Carrefour (was he stoned, or had the RKO medics given him starey potion?) I love that moment when he's at the house, advancing, and there's a close shot of him that's quite out of focus - it doesn't matter, in fact it may have been deliberate. As I've said before it's possibly J Roy Hunt's finest hour and is one of the most texturally interesting examples of cinema photography ever.

Love those wind-powered hanging flute bowl things, same sort of principle as an Aeolian Harp.

From an original idea by Inez Wallace, whoever she is, written by Curt Siodmak and Ardel Wray. I think comparisons to 'Jane Eyre' are rather over-stretched.

Passport to Pimlico (1949 Henry Cornelius)

It was 35ºC. Hermione Baddeley great as feisty dress shop owner, Betty Warren as the common sense one ("Well why don't you go and turn it on again?") Charlie Hawtrey has one of his most substantial performances (he's actually billed higher than Margaret Rutherford). The British like supporting the underdog, even though it's (sort of) foreign.

"Genuine stolen nylons."

Rear Window (1954 AH)

Last seen here. Only 48 in the AFI's Top 100 (Psycho is 14). You could watch (listen to) the film purely as an example of great sound design (as I mentioned before, it's a terribly noisy neighbourhood). We are, I pick up, off West Ninth Street - Greenwich Village, in fact, whilst Lisa (naturally) lives in a posh Uptown district of West 63rd Street.

In the Truffaut book, Hitch reveals that the Stewart-Kelly relationship in which he is disabled mirrors the murderer's in which the wife is similarly confined - mirror images. And that he was disappointed with Franz Waxman's love theme which the composer is creating.

The scene with the dead dog is the only one that breaks the 'rules' of the film where the shots are not from Stewart's point of view.

With Notorious, Truffaut's favourite Hitchcock film.

I love the way everyone just lets themselves into Stewart's apartment without knocking, even the detective - this is obviously a very deliberate point as finally, it's the murderer who lets himself in - he's just copying everyone else.

I Hired a Contract Killer (1990 Aki Kaurismäki & scr, ed)

Had long wanted to see Karusmäki's only English language film, starring the quintessential Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Léaud, who's as fabulous as ever.

Delighted to see it was dedicated to Michael Powell and from the red credits through Margi Clarke's red lips and roses you get that Powell red thing running throughout. In mood though, it reminded me more of Powell's better 'quota quickies' of the thirties in its brevity and wacky plot. Léaud puts out a hit on himself then changes his mind when he meets Clarke. Love the way he leaves a note for his assassin to say he's in the pub opposite! Meanwhile the killer, Ken Colley, isn't feeling very well... 

Colley is not only still alive but features in upcoming Dan Hawk Psychic Detective. And he was in Peaky Blinders (briefly). He was a favourite of Ken Russell.

Short quirky scenes and deadpan humour conspire beautifully together in a run-down looking London.

Off thing though is Clarke's delivery of lines, almost like English isn't her first language. (It isn't of course - it's Liverpudlian!)

Photographed by Timo Salminen. Good sound, too, from Timo Linnasalo.

The Nun's Story (1959 Fred Zinnemann & prod)

Begins slowly in Belgium with seemingly endless formations of black and white and prostrating nuns - the whole process of becoming a nun seems a mad practice and really quite negative in its repression of memories and self-castigation. "I hope this film ends in a bar in Montparnasse' I said hopefully, perhaps thinking of Buñuel's Simon of the Desert again. In fact, more the thought, "If only this film had been directed by Buñuel" - that would have been something.

Anyway, apart from relishing Audrey Hepburn's great performance (she was Oscar nominated), and admiring Franz Planer's photography and Franz Waxman's music, and enjoying the thought that most of the interiors were filmed at Cinecitta, the story picks up when she moves into the outside world at a tropical medicine school, then a mental institution, before she finally gets her dream to practice in the Congo. (There's no mention here of course of the awful history of the Belgians in Congo.) She becomes a match for hardworking doctor Peter Finch (good), who saves her life when she acquires TB.

Wasn't sure why there is an episode where she travels to meet a doctor who's dealing with leprosy victims - it doesn't integrate with the rest of the story.

Then things take a strange turn - she's summoned back to Belgium and WWII starts, she loses her desire to be a nun and is more interested in helping the resistance. And thus it ends with her leaving the order in a beautifully held long shot (where Q's joke comes in - 'Why change the habit of a lifetime?') Not a recruitment film for wannabe nuns, then, but overall, interesting.

With Edith Evans, Peggy Ashcroft, Dean Jagger, Mildred Dunnock, Patricia Collinge, Beatrice Straight (good as Mother in sanatorium), Lionel Jeffries, Coleen Dewhurst (schizo patient). Written by Robert Anderson, novel Kathryn C. Hulme. Edited by Walter Thompson (also Fat City, Farewell, My Lovely). Warner Bros.

I would have called it 'A Nun's Story', myself.

Sergio Leone was one of the assistant directors. He tried to pigeonhole Zinnemann about the High Noon train station scenes, but he was too busy.

The 'Warner Brothers Story' notes the decision not to have music at the end was because if it was upbeat, it indicated Hepburn had done the right thing, if downbeat that she hadn't - both of these could have upset portions of the audience. Much against Jack Warner's wishes, Zinnemann held out for none. It actually makes it work better.

The Great Buster (2018 Peter Bogdanovich & scr, narrated)

Feature length documentary, with some great material, e.g. the ads he did in the 1950s and 60s. Thankfully he did recover from his terrible mistake of moving in 1930 to MGM, where all creative control was taken away from him and he was badly mismanaged. Love that at the 1965 Venice Film Festival he received the longest standing ovation in its history. Some brilliant clips from early shorts and his run of amazing features, and loved the montage which showed all his injuries sustained throughout making them.

An eclectic cast of commentators includes Richard Lewis, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog and Carl Reiner.

The Navigator, Sherlock Jr., Our Hospitality definitely all on the must-see list.

We Own This City (2022 Reinaldo Marcus Green)

Y'know - King Richard. Before that, three episodes of Top Boy.

David Simon and George Pelecanos were showrunners on The Wire, but this is based on a non-fiction account of police corruption from Baltimore Sun journalist Justin Fenton (Simon introduced him to his publisher for a book deal, not thinking about making a TV version of it), so it feels like familiar Simon territory. Yes, I can't read any more of that interview as I've inadvertently read about the death of a character. But they definitely feel police corruption is now worse than it was in The Wire days. (Jimmy McNulty may have been unorthodox, to say the least, but at least he got results. These guys get results actually - they're just pocketing most of the cash and drugs they seize.)

It's quite complex, jumping between time zones, but very absorbing. And ultimately shattering, that the corruption extended way up as well. And that the war on drugs is lost. And that under Trump, civil rights went right on the back burner.

Jon Bernthal, Wunmi Mosaku (Temple, Luther, Capital, Dancing on the Edge), Jamie Hector (homicide cop), Josh Charles (The Good Wife), McKinley Belcher III (the least bad of the corrupt unit), Darrell Britt-Gibson, David Corenswet, Don Harvey, Delaney Williams (police commissioner), Larry Mitchell.

A six part series for Sky, edited by Matthew Booras and Joshua Raymond Lee, photographed by Yaron Orbach (Modern Love, Sing Street).

Back to School (1986 Alan Metter)

Cheerful rubbish, as successful businessman bug-eyed Rodney Dangerfield enrols at his son's high school, becomes extremely popular.

Here's a clue: story by Dangerfield, Greg Fields & Dennis Snee, screenplay by Steven Kampmann & Will Porter and Peter Torokvei & Harold Ramis.

One or two laughs.

Interesting cast: Keith Gordon, Sally Kellerman, Burt Young, Ned Beatty, Robert Downey Jr., Paxton Whitehead, Terry Farrell, M Emmet Walsh, Adrienne Barbeau, William Zabka, Severn Darden.

Comedian Dangerfield is an acquired taste.

Breeders - Season 3 (Simon Blackwell, Chris Addison)

Certainly not a comedy as the Martin Freeman character continues to blow a fuse about everything - worse, starts neglecting his wife Daisy Haggard who's suffering menopause problems. Best moment - she really doesn't want to talk to chatty neighbour, but he has sage pills for her, for the night sweats, and he's the only person to be thinking about her. The child problems are now with the ten year old daughter, who has the weight of the world on her shoulders - gets help from local vicar at least.

Then it transpires Freeman's dad Alun Armstrong has had an affair with a woman in the past and his mum Joanna Bacon isn't going to forgive him.

Alex Eastwood and Eve Prenelle are the kids.

10 episodes for Sky.

Barry - Season 3 (2022 Alec Berg, Bill Hader)

We didn't realise Now TV had left us only hours to complete the entire eight episode series - we didn't quite make it, unfortunately. It was all my fault, apparently... It wasn't annoying at all.

Highlights are - a scooter chase; and the scene where Barry has to detonate a bomb in the Bolivians' house - his detonation app doesn't work and he has to call tech support...

Meanwhile acting coach Henry Winkler thinks Barry has killed his wife, and is faced with his past by former colleagues he's been a shit to; and Barry's GF Sarah Goldberg is finding working in television difficult, with producers who believe in algorithms more than ratings.

"Vengeance is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die."

Stephen Root is the psychotic 'uncle', Anthony Carrigan the gay Chechen, With Elizabeth Perkins, Fred Melamed, Michael Irby, D'Arcy Carden, Joe Mantegna, Annabeth Gish.

Assassin for Hire (1951 Michael McCarthy)

Poor, set-bound independent British film, in which it is revealed far too early that Sydney Tafler is a hit man, thus zero suspense. The twist is easily guessable, and the whole story could have been told in 30 minutes. If only we had been watching Barry Season 3, not knowing we had only hours to complete it - the real tension...

With Ronald Howard (Trevor's son), Katharine Blake, John Hewer, Jane Rodney.

Suspect (2022 Matt Baker)

Another one that's clearly compromised by Covid as it takes the form of a succession of eight, short two-hander plays, as Jimmy Nesbitt confronts several people associated with the death of his estranged daughter. They are Joely Richardson, Ben Miller, Niamh Algar (good),  Antonia Thomas (good), Sacha Dhawan [more later]

An adaptation of a Danish series, Forhøret, which itself had mixed reviews. 

Gave up after four episodes.

The Outlaws, Season 2 (2022 Stephen Merchant)

Nice to have them back. It was filmed back-to-back with season one and so both must have been commissioned together.

Christian and Rani (Gamba Cole and Rhianne Barreto) finally get together. Is Frank (Chrsitopher Walken) reforming? Lady Gabriella (Eleanor Tomlinson) realises she has no real friends - except the faithful Gregory (Merchant). You sense the initially antagonistic John and Myrna (Darren Boyd and Clare Perkins) might be forming a mutual respect.

Yes, it's rather good as the gang have to start selling drugs to repay crime boss Claes Bang. Charles Babalola is good as the imprisoned dealer. But Barreto is fun as she gradually takes command, relishing her new crime role. Wraps things up nicely in double-bluff final episode.

Comissario Montalbano: Il Metodo Catalanotti (2021)

Interestingly, there's no director credited, through IMDB lists them as Alberto Sironi and Luca Zingaretti.  Screenplay (Sceneggiatura) by Francesco Bruni, Andrea Camillieri, Salvatore de Mola & Leonardo Marini, with additional dialogue by Valentina Alteri, from Camillieri's final Montalbano novel. DP Franco Lecca.

Greta Scarano is the new forensics expert with whom Montalbano is immediately smitten. Well not so much smitten as falls head over heels in love with, prompting the ending of his seemingly endless relationship with Livia.

I have to say that Franco Piersanti's score (which I think is all new) is stunning, sometimes making you think you're listening to Puccini. His love theme is exquisite.

It's a typically quirky number this one with only one plot, for a change, revolving around a dead body that Mimi has (literally) stumbled over whilst leaving his girlfriend's by the window - he then feels he can't reveal it - and an identical corpse found elsewhere. It all turns around the victim, who has unusual acting methods (thus the title).

Mimi posits that Montalbano's housekeeper should be made a Saint for her cooking.

With Zingaretti, the usual suspects - Cesare Bocci, Peppino Mazzotta, Antonia Truppo, Angelo Russo. And as this was Camillieri's last novel, probably the last time we'll see them all together.

The Time Travelers (1964 Ib Melchior)

Woeful rubbish, terribly directed and acted, awful music. Scientists find themselves in a devastated future. Po-faced in the extreme with unwise shots of humour. Watched a good portion in fast forward. Of interest as an early film by 'William' Zsigmond, with 'Leslie' Kovacs operating.