Charade has absolutely no business being this brilliant, which seems to be par for the course when looking at the films of Stanley Donen, one of Hollywood’s most exceptional filmmakers who was rarely given the rapturous acclaim he deserved. Most likely the result of the early years of his filmmaking career consisting of contract work…

The Savages are an ordinary couple resides in an unassuming house in London, where Myra (Kim Stanley) works as a medium, conducting weekly séances for a variety of people who come from far and wide to sample from her apparent brilliance. Her husband, Billy (Richard Attenborough) struggles to keep his wife under control, with her…

When you’re looking at someone whose output was as varied and prolific as Alfred Hitchcock, one tends to create tiers – and considering he is perhaps the greatest filmmaker to work in the English language, there are quite a few masterpieces littered throughout his career, as well as a few failures. Marnie is somewhere in…

Michael Armstrong (Paul Newman) and his fiancée Sarah Sherman (Julie Andrews) find themselves on a luxurious vacation in Northwest Europe, staying in some of the most luxurious hotels and eating at the most expensive restaurants money can buy. The caveat is that Michael is a world-renowned physicist and an expert on nuclear warfare, having been…

The thriller genre is one that often appears to occur on something of a binary scale, much like horror, its closest generic cousin – it is either derivative and plays upon a set of preordained ideals, or it is thoroughly unique, either having a highly original premise or an audacious execution to some more common…

Wynne (Jenny Agutter) is a precocious young woman whose personality reflects someone far older than her mere fifteen years. The adopted daughter of a working-class family, she is deeply in love with George (Bryan Marshall), her much older adoptive brother, whose mysterious attitude makes him even more irresistible to Wynne, who finds herself taken by…

One of my great blindspots in cinema has always been The Talented Mr. Ripley, a film that has always lurked omnipotent as something I knew I’d get around to eventually, but never felt much urgency to watch, as so much has been said about this film, despite the praise compounding with every passing review or…

I had a strange experience with The Good Liar, which exemplifies the perils of listening to the public discourse and allowing it to construct your opinions prior to seeing something. The Good Liar is a film that was met with such ambivalence upon release, it seemed almost contradictory to what I’d have hoped it would…

“There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators” This powerful quote was written by Victor Hugo and appears in his seminal masterwork, Les Misérables. They’re also the final words of another piece that appropriates the title of Hugo’s novel, as well as some of its underlying themes…

Dick Blaney (Jon Finch) is a former member of the Royal Air Force who fought for his country during the war. His life afterwards has hardly been fitting for a war hero, as he has struggled to earn a living through low-paying jobs that he reluctantly accepts, solely for the sake of surviving in a…