handcrafted film criticism by maryann johanson | since 1997
Come sit next to Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, and Eileen Atkins and eavesdrop on their witty banter, amiable swearing, and grand tales of their stage and film careers.
Actual unretouched phrases that people plugged into search engines this week that led them to this site (with some commentary from me)…
Reader Cecily suggests we gaze at the handsome, handsome Laurence Olivier…
Under the law that existed until 1978: works from 1955…
This the movie that My Week with Marilyn is about the making of…
A hundred years of handsome Hollywood hotties, from Douglas Fairbanks Sr. to George Clooney, in three and a half minutes…
Olivier’s take on Shakespeare’s story of madness and murder most foul is unmistakably a filmic one — with its monologues recast as internal thoughts heard in hushed voiceovers and use of dizzying camerawork to show Hamlet’s inner turmoil, this could never have worked on stage. The emotional desolation of Elsinore’s inhabitants is conveyed with a roving camera that swoops down on characters plotting or moping in huge, empty halls.
Atmospheric and moody, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca is a masterpiece of style and substance, an extended meditation on how the dead haunt the living. Photographed in somber shadows, few movies before or since have taken such glorious advantage of black-and-white film.
