First Virna Lisi, now Anita Ekberg dies, eclipsing (in every sense) the passing of her younger, less notorious colleague in sex symbol-dom…

As the media’s pundits perch, Janus-like, on the threshold of the New Year, and consider the fruits of 2014 while anticipating the pleasures to come – which read ever more like some galactic football results…

Our cinemas are full of exciting product this month. There was the Babadook around Halloween, an above-average creeper, then Interstellar, which packed a lifetime’s experience into its galactic proportions (and by some accounts it felt like it),…

Last month the Ipswich Film Society showed Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, in part to commemorate the hundred years that have elapsed since the commencement of the First World War…

Stung by Patrice Leconte’s latest underwhelming effort (A Promise) at the IFT last month, I dusted off one of my old favourites, The Hairdresser’s Husband, to be reminded of former glories…

With the summer gone, it is time to take stock of some of the summer movies, for whose sake I have sadly neglected the arthouse fare: it is my one chance of the year to catch up with popular cinema,…

What with exam marking and report writing it has been a pretty fallow month on the cinematic front so, if I may be permitted an indulgence, I thought I would take my cue from Sight & Sound’s very successful ‘closing shot’ series at the end of their monthly magazine…

Although he had not worked in movies for nearly two decades, the death from cancer last month of Gordon Willis marked the passing of one of the great cinematographers from the modern half of film history…

Last week I saw two very different films, both built around the concept of one week’s events, and both using the days of the week as chapter titles up on the screen. The first was Jaume Balagueró’s psychological horror,…

First off, I owe Matthew McConaughey an apology, having scoffed at his body transforming antics in Dallas Buyers Club last month…

Yep, it’s that time of year again, and has been since Christmas. We have had the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs, with the inimitably imitable Stephen Fry, still the best of hosts, despite the occasionally misguided off-the-wall fancy…

Obituary: Philip Seymour Hoffman (1967-2014)We were all shocked and saddened at the beginning of the month to hear of the untimely death of Philip Seymour Hoffman from a drug overdose…

I went to see the second instalment of Peter Jackson’s epic visualisation of Tolkien’s The Hobbit – The Desolation of Smaug – the other day…

The cinematic event of last September was for this viewer undoubtedly Paolo Sorrentino’s new film, La grande bellezza (The Great Beauty)…

Death holds out his hands for the innocent babe’s life, but the heroine after some hesitation demurs…

Rebel without a Cause is one of those films, like The Seven Year Itch, which acquired mythic status because it offered the spectacle of a tragically short-lived star persona stripped to its essentials…

I wrote this in the midst of this summer’s seemingly unending cycle of effects movies. I have been to see Tom Cruise in Oblivion, Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man Three, and the new Star Trek film, Into Darkness,…

Still on a high after this weekend's screening of Abel Gance's silent masterpiece, Napoléon (1927),…

Are you, like this writer, a George Clooney fan, I wonder? During the last month I happen to have seen a number of films in which he had a hand: Gravity,…

...the actress who came from TV and returned to TV, made a sizzling debut in The Thief (1952, pictured) opposite Ray Milland,…