Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Brighton Rock (1947)



Wracked with religious guilt and anxieties of inadequacy (both sexual and political) on a Napoleonic level, Attenborough makes a perfect noir protagonist. He combines the boyish good looks of Farley Granger and the psychopathic placidity of Richard Widmark, but also brings a deeply rooted spirituality that offers no easy solutions and only complicates his psyche even more. Thank goodness Greene came on board to co-write the script with Terence Rattigan: like a good Catholic, Greene ensures that punishment outweighs the possibility of redemption...

Read the full review here at The L Magazine.

L'important c'est d'aimer (The Important Thing Is To Love) (1975)

Less than a year old, newcomers to the DVD field Mondo Vision have been championing the overlooked ouerve of Andrzej Zulawski, a Polish filmmaker (and one-time assistant to Andrzej Wajda) who has spent much of his career working in France. The company made their debut with his movie The Public Woman (1984); today marks Mondo Vision's second release, Zulawski's L'important c'est d'aimer (The Important Thing Is To Love) (1975), appearing for the first time on home video here in North America in both a single disc and two-disc Limited Edition...

Read the full review here at The L Magazine.