Contemporary English Homers During the second half of the twentieth century and continuing into the twenty-first, poets, classicists, and others have produced an astounding number of distinguished English translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. This may be surprising at first, since the study of Greek and of the Homeric te...
The sailor, the flyer and the soldier, heading home It’s close to time for Sight and Sound‘s decennial list of international critics’ ‘best films’. I’m not very keen on these lists but they seem to amuse a lot of cinephiles. I’m intrigued as to what criteria the selected critics use for their personal choices (i.e. outside of the guidelines they are sent by the journal) and why they end up with mainly the same kinds of films from the same directors. I’ve seen the majority of the 2...
The phrase film noir was first coined in 1946 by a group of French critics to describe the emerging movement of mainly black and white Hollywood films with dark, pessimistic themes and signature motifs such as alienated antiheroes, rain slicked streets, dark shadows and seductive femme fatales.Borrowing heavily from the hard-boiled but literary detective novels of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, film noir attracted some of cinema’s greatest craftsmen including Orson Welles, Howard Hawk...
I am not the only person unduly fascinated by a series of eight cheap, forgettable films released by Monogram Pictures between 1946 and 1948, all starring a malleable cast of diminutive, fully adult actors dubbed the Teen Agers. Podcasts and conversations have convinced me that the Teen Agers films hold a rare fascination for certain people. These people, like me, have been around the block a few more times than necessary on bad movies, and know more than a little bit about 20th century film....