Glenn Ford in Human Desire (1954) Vitals Glenn Ford as Jeff Warren, railroad engineer and Army veteran El Reno, Oklahoma, Fall 1953 Film: Human Desire Release Date: August 6, 1954 Director: Fritz Lang Costume Designer: Jean Louis (gowns) WARNING! Spoilers ahead! Background Glenn Ford was born 110 years ago on May 1, 1916. The Quebec-born actor specialized as everymen with a tough side, making him the ideal star in classic film noir like Gilda (1946) and The Big Heat (1953) as well as westerns…
In a continuing look at black and white publicity photos created for Twin Peaks in 1990, this image features Peggy Lipton as Norma Jennings. These series of portraits were released by Capitol Cities / ABC Television to help viewers keep track of the many characters in Mark Frost and David Lynch’s groundbreaking series. PEGGY LIPTON... The post Twin Peaks Publicity – Peggy Lipton as Norma Jennings appeared first on TWIN PEAKS BLOG.
The Devil Wears Prada 2 2026, David Frankel My rating: I like it This movie is basically the first one but adapted to more modern concepts (social media, late stage capitalism). And honestly, that’s fine. It does better than probably most other unnecessary sequels do, and it was an enjoyable watch from start to finish. Bonus points for having Gaga in it. It was cool to watch the Milan scenes while literally being in Milan, too.
I turn 40 in about 6 weeks. Last night, on a whim, I decided that I'd like to watch 40 films I've never seen before in advance of that happening. For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to ask Bluesky to recommend some of these films to me. I asked people to recommend their favourite "I've never met anybody else who's seen this" film. As always when you ask for recommendations online, some people are shit at understanding the task. But sometimes you strike gold. I discarded responses…
Kiss of the Spider Woman has long occupied a curious place in the musical theatre landscape, a show spoken of far more often than it is encountered. Since its Broadway premiere in 1992, it has lingered at the margins of the canon, half‑remembered, half‑mythologised. Which makes its appearance at Bristol Old Vic feel not so much like a revival as an emergence, something long submerged breaking the surface again. What immediately becomes apparent is just how singular this musical remains. Set…
One hundred years ago this month, Grace Kingsley noticed a new trend: “In all your life put together you probably have never seen so many circuses as you are seeing and are going to see in the movies these days.” She was right—the number of circus films had doubled to 20 in 1925 and stayed in that neighborhood until 1929, when they went back to around 10 per year, according to the AFI Film Catalog. Kingsley wasn’t particularly happy about that. She visited the set of one in production,…
What's Up, Doc? (1972)
I watched Oddity in preparation for Damian Mc Carthy’s new movie out this weekend, Hokum.1 I didn’t know anything about it apart from its extremely effective marketing, which suggests intense “elevated horror” in an old manor house, featuring a severe white-haired woman and an unnerving and grotesque, life-sized wooden figure. And it delivers on that! If that sounds like your thing and you haven’t seen it yet, I highly recommend seeing it without reading on. What surprised me the most about…
I like to think of films through the lens of poetry (importantly different than a film poem). Or maybe its perhaps simpler to say that I prefer films that feel like poetry. Not all films are best understood through this lens, like Marvel movies for example because of their primary focus on entertainment and narrative arcs over thematic messaging (which isn’t to say that there is no thematic content). How might we judge cinema as poetry? How do we judge poetry? “Much of the muddle one finds…
The zombie is a cocktail created by Donn Beach at his famous Don the Beachcomber restaurant in Hollywood in 1934. It’s made of fruit juices, liqueurs, and various Caribbean rums and drinks (including Angostura bitters). Its name origin is quite funny: Legend has it that Donn Beach originally concocted the zombie to help a hung-over customer get through a business meeting. The customer returned several days later to complain that he had been turned into a zombie for his entire trip. Its smooth,…
Welcome to 2010. There’s rather a lot of recordings today, but having checked the schedule this won’t keep up. It’s the last gasp of the holidays. The first recording starts with a trails for Doctor Who and Gavin and Stacey. Then, as a kind palate-cleanser for having to watch the two Pirates of the Caribbean movies, it’s Muppet Treasure Island. As we started watching this, my daughter commented that the score sounded a bit similar to POTC and wonders if that had been inspired, or if they were…
The Great Albert is an episode of the British anthology drama series Scorpion Tales (1978), which was broadcast by ITV for just one series of six episodes that had the loosely interconnected premise of having “a sting in their tale”, and it has something of a “wyrd” pedigree and background. It was written by John Peacock, who also wrote the And the Wall Came Tumbling Down episode of the 1984 anthology drama series Hammer House of Mystery and Suspense, which, in A Year In The Country: Other…
lingthusiasm:What do you do when the only records that remain of a language were made by someone who had absolutely horrendous views of the people who spoke it?In this episode, your host Lauren Gawne gets enthusiastic about a crossover episode with Claire Aubin of This Guy Sucked! Lauren’s Guy who Sucked is Daisy Bates, who did a lot of early 20th century work documenting over 100 Indigenous languages in western and southern Australia, while also directly adding to policies and narratives that…
Daniel Boone, Trail Blazer - WikipediaJoin legendary frontiersman Daniel Boone as he defends early American settlers from British forces and hostile threats during the height of the Revolutionary War. Starring Bruce Bennett as Boone, this action-packed adventure blends history and heroism with classic 1950s frontier flair.
I just watched the film Ugetsu for the first time in many years, as part of my Mizoguchi retrospective, and found it just as great as I remembered (starring both Machiko Kyō and Kinuyo Tanaka — the only such film, as far as I know, although Tanaka later directed Kyō in The Wandering Princess). As every schoolboy knows, it’s based on Ugetsu Monogatari, “a collection of nine supernatural tales first published in 1776”; Wikipedia explains the title thus: The word Ugetsu is a compound word; u (雨)…
Well, even if I have no time for blogging, I at least can now talk about the first of the things we’re working on. A video essay for Masters of Cinema’s 1929 Laurel & Hardy collection, which we’ve titled Glorious Disaster, after a phrase by the great Walter Kerr. Always a little disconcerting when they […]
It's time for a look at the May schedule on Turner Classic Movies!Gregory Peck is the May Star of the Month. Approximately 20 Peck films will be shown spread across Friday evenings this month.The May Noir Alley films will be DRUNKEN ANGEL (1948) on May 2nd and 3rd, THE STRANGE LOVE OF MARTHA IVERS (1946) on the 9th and 10th, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN (1951) May 16th-17th, and HOUSE OF NUMBERS (1957) on the 30th and 31st.I love the May Special Theme, focusing on Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu every…
Blue Heron, an absorbing debut film from Canadian director Sophy Romvari, begins as if it's going to be an idyl about the joys of childhood. Romvari introduces us to the kids of a Hungarian immigrant family that's settling into a new home on Vancouver Island in the 1990s. A truck is unloaded, and the kids are encouraged to get out of the way. Romvari and cinematographer Maya Bankovic keep the camera close to their characters. You almost feel the children brushing past. Romvari bases the film on…
In ten days, I’ll be on the Croisette for the Marché du Film, the business end of the Cannes Film Festival. To prepare, I have gone through the conference schedules for this year (as well as 2024 and 2025) to see what these 742 events reveal about the film business in 2026.I’ll go through it in detail later in the article, but here are the key themes as I see them:The conference is shrinking (slightly). The 2026 edition has fewer sessions and about 16% fewer programming hours compared to recent…
The opening credits of Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) strobe between red and black iterations of string and investigation boards. ▲ Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) ▲ Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) ▲ Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) ▲ Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) ▲ Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) ▲ Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) ▲ Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) ▲ Psycho Killer (dir. Gavin Polone, 2026) ▲ Psycho Killer (dir.…
For the second day of Golden Week, I went to see "A New Dawn" at Cinemalice in Jinbocho. This is an animated movie directed by Yoshitoshi Shinomiya. Shinomiya is a nihonga artist1 and worked under Makoto Shinkai; A New Dawn is his directional debut for a feature-length film. *This is a spoiler-free review. I won't give away the ending or specific plot details, but I will talk about the broader strokes of the plot, so be warned. SynopsisThe film centers around Sentarō, Keitarō, and Kaoru, three…
It had been a long wait to catch this movie on the big screen. Max and I decided to catch the late night show at Inox, Marina Mall on Thursday. I had [read the book](https://xavierroy.com/library/#eyJub3JtYWxpemVkIjp0cnVlLCJ0aXRsZSI6IlRoZSBBZWRpZmljaXVtIChCZXRhKSB7VGV4dCBzZWFyY2ggUHJvamVjdCBIYWlsIE1hcnl9IiwidXJsIjoiaHR0cHM6Ly94YXZpZXJyb3kuY29tL2xpYnJhcnkvIiwiaGFzaCI6Ii4vL2xpYnJhcnkvPyZfc3VpZD0xNzc3ODAxNjE0MjU0MDQyNDU5NzAwMzA0Mzc4NDY3IiwiZGF0YSI6eyJjb21wb25lbnRzIjp7ImJvb2stc2VhcmNoIjp7InR5cGUiOiJ…
It was on my second viewing of RKO ‘s 1947 film noir They Won’t Believe Me that one scene stood out. A brief one, of the film’s protagonist, Larry Ballantine (Robert Young), waiting at a roadside stop for the bus bringing his girlfriend. It’s almost a throwaway; a setup for a squalid meeting between two conspiring lovers—one of whom (that being Larry) is married—who plan on absconding to Reno with stolen dough. But on this viewing I saw in this scene something…different, something meaningful. I…
AFTER THE SHOOTING Despite the title, Anna Yates’ setting in an episcopalian church room full of calm skylight, and one effective moment near the end, Fran Kranz’ tense 105-minute play draws little from any Christian sensibility of forgiveness or eternity. It concerns, like James Graham’s PUNCH but in real time, an episode of restorative justice. In this case it is vicarious on both sides: the perpetrator is dead. His parents are at a table with parents of one victim. The scene is set before,…
I’ve enjoyed watching Mr Chops on YouTube, mainly for his video game content, but his travel videos are pretty cool too. The one above shows how he went a whole day in London without spending any money. It involved a lot of walking, free water, and the hospitality of Sikhs in a gurdwara. The post Spending an entire day in London without spending an entire penny appeared first on Cultrface.
Zach Cregger (Weapons, Barbarian, The Whitest Kids U’Know) co-wrote and directed this latest installment in the long running horror movie franchise, which looks to remain in the “side-story” realm for the Resident Evil franchise a’la the Mila Jovovich films. The trailer is nothing if not effective, with a very creepy looping of the incorrect number chime. We’ll see how it plays out. Resident Evil hits theaters on September 18th, 2026.
Oh god, when I first started watching the 1975 BBC miniseries Edward the King, about the
A special team, including prosecutors Lin Zhi Tao and Bai En Yu, works to protect children through the legal system. They come across crimes that test their emotional strength, but despite the horrifying cases, they have to fight for justice for one of society’s most vulnerable: the children. Characters Lin Zhi Tao (played by TBD): A no-nonsense prosecutor who becomes part of the special Juvenile Crime Division. Bai En Yu (played by Vengo Gao): A corrections officer at a juvenile corrections…
Who won Million Dollar Secret season 2? And how did the finale compare to season 1? Here are my thoughts and the final gambits of Daisy, Kaleb, Kat, Kevin, Lauren, and Nick.
Asian jumping worms on the sidewalk in Oakland, March 2024 (photo by Kate St. John) 30 April 2026 We’re used to watching out for pests while turning over the soil but here’s one you may not recognize. Asian jumping worms (Amynthas agrestis) are an invasive species that writhe and jump unlike our relatively placid earthworms. Earthworms benefit the garden but Asian jumping worms ruin the soil. If you have them, get rid of them! Here’s a quick video from Syracuse, Onondaga County, New York that…
