May 24
Alfred Hitchcock followed up the Oscar-winning Rebecca with Foreign Correspondent, a sweep in the other direction to say the least. Categorized as an adventure B-movie, this 1940 picture gave the British filmmaker a solid one-two punch in terms of critical reception and award recognition. It actually went up against Rebecca for Best Picture at the 13th Academy Awards (and rightly lost to the better film).
A sensitive, careful and subtle motion picture, Eytan Fox’s Yossi is a wonderful exploration of loneliness and longing. This 2012 film is the sequel to Fox’s 2002 flick Yossi & Jagger. That picture was well-received for telling a romantic tale about two soldiers at the Israeli-Lebanon border who find relief from the ambush of daily violence.
Check out the rest of this review at Yossi Movie Review: Of Love, Loneliness and Humanity at Cinema Sentries.
Directed by Ric Roman Waugh, Snitch is the sort of movie that has its heart in the right place but missteps on just about every aspect of delivery. The filmmaker was actually a stuntman before slipping into the director’s chair, an interesting transition and a surefire way to offer special insight into the framing of action scenes.
One of the best action movies of all time is Die Hard, a down and dirty adaptation of Roderick Thorp’s novel Nothing Lasts Forever. The 1988 flick hatched a franchise that endures to this day, but there’s nothing quite like the original. Directed by John McTiernan, Die Hard is the epitome of taking the right path from tension to action to reach decisive fulfilment in the climax.
When Alfred Hitchcock reached America to make movies, he thought he was going to be crafting a version of Titanic. He met producer David O. Selznick upon arrival and was taken to a giant ship to be told that this was going to be his first film in Hollywood. A series of events sunk that idea and the British director set about adapting Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca.
