Dying before he was sixty seemed like a fitting final action for the maverick film-maker Sam Peckinpah. Better to burn out than fade away and all that. For whenever Sam was in town the rage-filled stories of excess flew thick and fast, tales that included wild on-set bust-ups, legendary alcohol and coke consumption, budget blowouts, […]

“Nice isn’t it? To see a bit of color.” So says Kelly (Stanley) as she looks at the green fields through a train window on the way from London to the seaside. It’s a banal observation and yet so telling. There is no color in Kelly’s life. No joy, no hope, no normality. Every day […]

Woody Allen is a prolific artist who’s been making roughly a film a year since the late sixties. His timid yet talkative onscreen persona (simultaneously intellectual and stupid, riddled with self-doubt and wrapped up in his weedy, balding, bespectacled frame) surely places him among the most distinctive film stars of all time. It’s a double-edged […]

You’ve probably heard of MGM and United Artists, but what about the very lovely Cannon Films? It was a studio that took on the Hollywood big boys in the 1980s. For a glorious, plate-spinning few years it became the world’s largest independent movie production company, cranking out up to six low-budget pictures a month. How […]