Donald Clarke

• Best-of lists
• June 29, 2011, 22:52

Yes, silly season is upon us. It’s the time to draw up ridiculous lists that reduce great works of art into neat, countable entities that can be easily rated by idiots such as your current correspondent. The subject today (more …

• Video Games
• June 27, 2011, 22:05

First things first. This post is not some huffy, tweedy rant about the superiority of films to video games. Such generalised comparisons are largely pointless. Given how differently the entertainments operate, this would be rather like making an unfavourable comparison …

• Deaths
• June 26, 2011, 12:46

“Just one more thing, ma’am.” That was your catchphrase. Though the great man had a distinguished career — particularly in the films of John Cassavetes — Peter Falk would, almost certainly, not object to the phrase “best known for playing …

• Trailerspotting
• June 23, 2011, 20:22

Which film are you looking forward to the most this year? Readers will be aware that Screenwriter is eagerly anticipating Tomas Alfredson’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. But the prize for most promising feature might just go to David Cronenberg’s A …

• James Bond Sequels
• June 20, 2011, 18:41

Okay, let’s get the preliminaries out of the way first. You’re one to talk, Mr Martin Campbell. I mean it’s not as if The Green Lantern is ever going to be confused with The Dark Knight. Didn’t you also direct …

• Oscars
• June 17, 2011, 14:20

Look away now if you find the whole Oscar business unimaginably tedious. Two years after the Academy stunned analysts by increasing the number of best picture nominations from five to 10, that body has made another, even odder change to …

• Moaning
• June 14, 2011, 23:04

Well, some are two-hours long. Others are three-hours long. Films featuring Adam Sandler last about two and a half days (or so it seems). That’s a pretty stupid question, buddy. You want to pull yourself together. Let’s start again. How …

• Censorship
• June 12, 2011, 23:04

The question is prompted by news from across the water. As you may be aware, the British Board of Film Classification has refused to issue a certificate to the even-more-gruesome sequel to the already fairly hideous The Human Centipede. That …

• Box Office Figures
• June 9, 2011, 22:18

Make it about cars. That’s how. Thank you and good night. The market for documentaries has fluctuated wildly over the last decade. All the computer screens went green in 2004 when Michael Moore’s entertaining, wildly unreliable Fahrenheit 9/11 took the …

• Uncategorized
• June 7, 2011, 23:30

Thank heavens. It looks as if we can finally shut up about the delayed release of The Tree of Life. I won’t reiterate the story, because, by this stage, you will either know the details or you won’t care. It …

• Trailerspotting
• June 5, 2011, 19:52

I suppose the time has come for Trailerspotting to address the promo for David Fincher’s upcoming adaptation of Stieg Larsson‘s The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. We don’t get to see the film until Christmas, but enough has been shot for …

• Cannes Film Festivals
• June 2, 2011, 18:11

It would be overdoing it to refer to a conspiracy of silence. But the British film media seem oddly reluctant to point out that one of the world’s oldest film festivals — the oldest by some reckoning — is in …