Category: Movie

dir. James Cameron (1997) Cameron, already a celebrated director, hit the stratosphere with the release of Titanic, a dramatisation of the voyage of the infamous passenger liner. Already immortalised in film multiple times before Cameron’s effort, what sets this one apart is the manner in which the disaster movie emerges from the water to collide…

dir. Sergei Bondarchuk (1966) Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, originally released split into four feature-length pictures, is a masterclass in scale. Any adaptation of a dense tome like Tolstoy’s masterpiece will have material to spare, and so the 7h+ spent here in the world of Napoleonic-era Russia are still never slow nor lacking in action, be…

dir. Zack Snyder (2021) The zenith of the superhero movie boom, Zack Snyder’s Justice League is remarkable in almost every way. After Warner Bros made the deeply unfortunate decision to turn direction of the original film over to a disgrace-pending Joss Whedon, who produced an abominable flop, a persistent crew of fulminating fans kept the…

dir. Abel Gance (1927) A third biopic is october’s long movie club selection, Abel Gance’s 1927 Napoleon, currently available in the 5h32m cut released on bluray by the BFI but shortly to be joined by the Netflix-sponsored 7+ hour original cut.

dir. David Lean (1962) Contemporary in history to Reds, another biopic – this time based on T.E. Lawrence’s account of his time fighting the Ottoman empire. Lawrence, given a stunning performance by Peter O’Toole, is a naïve adventurer desperate to escape his own mundanity and demons. Manipulated at every turn by power brokers, never clear…

dir. Warren Beatty (1981) This historical epic uses its extended runtime to stretch out both before and after the Russian Revolution, with the Bolsheviks taking power almost exactly at the mid-point. The real-life story of John Reed and Louise Bryant, American journalists who were there to witness it happen, is rendered like history: restless stability…