Donald Clarke

• Best-of lists
• August 29, 2011, 23:06

The “From the Vault” strand on Roger Ebert’s website this week offers us a really nice episode of Siskel and Ebert from 1978. It’s the best and worst of the year show. Roger and Gene name two relatively off-centre films …

• 3-D
• August 27, 2011, 19:50

In my review of the amusing Final Destination 5 I neglected to mention that it actually makes rather good use of 3-D. There, I’ve said it. I’ve allowed myself to recommend at least one use of that unlovely process. Over …

• Moaning
• August 23, 2011, 21:11

At the beginning of the summer — when the blockbusters were still emerging from hibernation — I attended a London press screening of The Tolerable Thor! As the mighty warrior stowed his hammer and the initial credits rolled, I gathered …

• Television
• August 21, 2011, 21:53

Can there be such a thing a cult TV channel? If so, could that beast emerge from an establishment body such as the BBC? One definition of a cult is something that relatively few people pay attention to, but which …

• Best-of lists
• August 17, 2011, 17:16

No, this is not about Harry Potter (well, not entirely). The efficient review-compilation site Metacritic has just published an interesting article listing those films which ran up the biggest differentials between the aggregate ratings of reviewers and visitors to the …

• Best-of lists
• August 13, 2011, 20:55

Blah, blah, blah. Once again, we don’t mean “greatest”. We mean “favourite”. This should explain why neither Helen Terry nor Paris Hilton make it in. That said, there are, once again, a few indisputable greats here alongside the Rutherfords and …

• Apes
• August 10, 2011, 16:54

In a few days, you can enjoy the bumper ape edition of The Ticket. The distributors of James Marsh‘s Project Nim, an excellent documentary on efforts to educate a chimp in the 1970s, glanced at the schedule and, rather cannily, …

• Best-of lists
• August 6, 2011, 19:15

Now, first things first. Once again, it is important to stress the word “favourite”. An attempt to objectively assess the “greatest” actors of all time would — despite the impossibility of the task — yield 10 very different personalities. When …

• Oscars Uncategorized
• August 4, 2011, 21:22

In recent years, the Oscar mob have done a decent job when it came to handing out honorary gongs. Two years ago, Lauren Bacall, Gordon Willis and Roger Corman were the lucky recipients. Now that’s some line-up. This year’s announcement …

• Stanley Kubrick
• August 1, 2011, 21:08

Here’s a very interesting video from Rob Ager, a self-taught Liverpudlian film sleuth, on the cerebral subject of “Spacial Awareness in The Shining“. Rob is not the first person to discover fascinating architectural anomalies in Stanley Kubrick’s last great film, …