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Screenwriter

Donald Clarke

Whingeing about cinema and real life since 2009

Trailerspotting

Inside the first trailer for Inside Llewyn Davis

Oh man. If this ends up being no good I will happily volunteer to saw my own head off live on YouTube. Actually, that’s not quite right. It’s not so much that I expect the next film from the Coen …

Mama Mia! Horror films in January

This post could also have been called “the unstoppable Jessica Chastain”. Snow permitting, I will be  in London on Monday to talk to that actor about her performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s (to say the least) controversial Zero Dark Thirty. We …

Cahiers du Cinéma goes for Holy Motors

Cahiers du Cinéma‘s  ever-eccentric best-of-the-year list has just been unveiled. In previous years, the durable organ of French cinema has expressed admiration for such odd films as Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny, Clint Eastwood’s Space Cowboys and Brian de Palma’s …

David Fincher erects a House of Cards for Netflix

The first trailer is in for Netflix’s adaptation of Michael Dobbs’s admired TV series House of Cards. It is faintly terrifying to recall that the original series emerged a full 22 years ago. Of course it did. Oldies will remember …

Hollywood’s latest craze: names.

One can generally find some reason for unusual trends in Hollywood. True, the notoriously unresponsive business is normally reacting to something that happened years previously. Recall, for instance, how the 1960s didn’t happen in Hollywood until 1971 or so. I …

Trailerspotting engages with Lincoln

It’s hard to know what to say about this. Oh, yeah. I know what to say. It looks exactly as I expected Lincoln to look when, four score and seven years ago, I heard that Steven Spielberg was easing the thing …

The Master dominates our festival round up.

Christmas comes earlier and earlier every year. There’s no way around it. Oscar season kicks off with the twin whammy of the Venice and Toronto film festivals. Let’s pretend that’s not the case and just talk about the movies (almost …

Two points about Trouble with the Curve.

Here is the trailer for the latest film starring — but not directed by — the great Clint Eastwood. As I understand it, Clint had decided to retire from acting, but when his long-time producer, Robert Lorenz, told him he …