April Film: His Girl Friday (1940)
His Girl Friday 92 minutes | 18 January 1940 | United States Setting the standard for screwball comedy and rapid-fire dialogue, this second adaptation of The Front Page by the playwrights Ben...
Cactus Flower (1969)
★★★½ (3.5 out of 4 stars) - More than mere confection, which by nature lies there enticingly and dwindles the more that we eat, and just like the titular cactus which sits on dental assistant Stephanie Dickinson's desk, cannily marking her transformation, Cactus Flower positively blossoms. The third film in three years from director Gene Saks - hot on the heels of two resounding Neil Simon success stories...
The Blind Side (2009)
★ (1 out of 4 stars) - The Blind Side purports to tell the real-life story of Michael Oher, depicted here as a poor oversized black kid from the ghetto. He's in and out of foster homes thanks to an absentee father and a drug addict mother, until the father of one of his friends - on whose couch he has been sleeping - brings him to the attention of the football coach of a local Christian school...
High Noon (1952)
★★★★ (4 out of 4 stars) - Will Kane (Gary Cooper), the marshal of a small frontier town in New Mexico Territory, gets married in a small civil ceremony to his beautiful young wife Amy Fowler (Grace Kelly), a Quaker whose imminent plans include a family and a convenience store someplace else. Fully intending to play the doting husband, to that end it is also Kane's last day on the job, and he hands in his badge...
Behind the Song: ‘M’appari’ from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha
‘M’appari’ is the best known name for the central aria from Friedrich von Flotow’s Martha, a romantic comic opera in four acts. Flotow – who was born into a musical family, his mother...
May Film: Born to Win (1971)
Born to Win 88 minutes | 1 December 1971 | United States ‘Born to Win is the grimly ironic title of this jet-black comedy about heroin addicts. George Segal plays Jay Jay, an...
March Film: McLintock! (1963)
McLintock! 127 minutes | 13 November 1963 | United States A homespun affair which saw John Wayne test his comic chops while expounding his views on political corruption, the cinematic treatment of...
September Film: Bowery Blitzkrieg (1941)
Bowery Blitzkrieg 62 minutes | 1 August 1941 | United States ‘While a cop steers a kid street-fighter away from being a public nuisance, a petty hoodlum leads a studious kid into...
Buster Keaton and His Pork Pie Hat
Following the rise of the top hat, bowler or derby, Panama, fedora, and flat cap across the nineteenth century, by the first decades of the twentieth century a man could scarcely open...