Donald Clarke

• Deaths
• September 30, 2010, 22:26

We’ve been buzzing around a lot this week, so I haven’t had time to ring the morose bell and mourn the loss of Arthur Penn and Tony Curtis. It would, however, be a shame not to post a sentence. Farewell, …

• Moaning
• September 26, 2010, 22:01

The new edition of The Time Out Film Guide has just popped through my spacious letter box. If you’re interested, this is, by some margin, the best such guide available. Okay, it’s not as comprehensive as Leonard Maltin or as …

• Censorship
• September 22, 2010, 15:38

Just a quick update on the kerfuffle surrounding the banning of Meir Zarchi’s lovely I Spit on Your Grave. Ger Connolly, the acting classification officer, has issued the following cautious statement: “IFCO does not wish to be drawn into what …

• Censorship
• September 20, 2010, 22:00

Welcome back to 1983 (or so). News reaches us that the Irish Film Classification Office has refused to issue a certificate for the DVD re-issue of first-generation video nasty I Spit on Your Grave. They have, in other words, banned …

• Moaning Uncategorized
• September 19, 2010, 19:29

We’ve talked about this more than a few times in the past. The most outrageous class of misleading promotion remains the habit of issuing trailers for foreign language films that conspicuously fail to include any dialogue. You could sit through …

• Deaths
• September 12, 2010, 13:02

With the death of Claude Chabrol, the thrilling conflagration that was the French New Wave seems even more distant. On paper Chabrol looks like an archetypal member of the movement. Like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, he was a critic …

• Box Office Figures Romcoms
• September 10, 2010, 21:12

One of the great mysteries of contemporary cinema concerns the decline of the romantic comedy into the most (justifiably) reviled of all mainstream genres. Many of the greatest films ever made in Hollywood fall into that category. It Happened One …

• Rock 'n' pop.
• September 7, 2010, 22:37

When I started this “blog” I never thought I’d end up recommending a poem in The New Yorker. Have I gone fey? Do I now care that, after encountering a dead hedgehog, some middle-aged academic has set to contemplating eternity? Not …

• Trailerspotting
• September 5, 2010, 22:08

Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan is, I guess, currently the film everyone wants to see. ∏ and Requiem for a Dream secured the director something a tad more weighty than a mere cult following. Like David Fincher and Christopher Nolan, Darren inspires …

• Jean-Luc Godard
• September 2, 2010, 14:37

Three months ago, after furrowing my way through the Cannes premiere of Film Socialisme — the latest, fantastically baffling picture by Jean-Luc Godard — I surged energetically up the steps of the Palais towards the room where the great man …