Hollywood Cinema
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THE GOLDEN CHILD (Dir. Michael Ritchie, 1986)
Not strictly vintage Murphy, The Golden Child was made at a time when he was the biggest film star in the world. Undeniably a star vehicle for Murphy’s loud mouth antics, when the film was released back in 1986, the poster deliberately alluded to Beverly Hills Cop, and was pitched in a similar vein by Continue reading
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THE MAGNIFICENT 7 (Dir. Antoine Fuqua, 2016, US)
What if you got the opportunity to rework a contestable classic but had nothing to say? This is pretty much what The Magnificent 7 feels like. One can probably imagine the creative heads that cooked up this idea stemmed from the certified stone cold image of Denzel Washington as a mysterious gunslinger on a horse cloaked Continue reading
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DEEP VALLEY (Dir. Jean Negulesco, 1947, US) – Melo-Noir
The first time I heard about Ida Lupino was in Scorsese’s journey through American cinema series, which first aired, in the mid 1990s on C4. Scorsese framed Lupino as an auteur director who dealt with social issues that went unmapped in much of mainstream American cinema, such as rape. It was only later I realised how Continue reading
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SOME CAME RUNNING (Dir. Vincent Minnelli, 1958, US) – Twisted Americana
Sinatra sleepwalked through a lot of the films he starred in. His acting could easily be described as blank. Many of his performances bear little finesse, nor are they memorable. Occasionally, Sinatra did deliver but his career was inconsistent and an extension of his fame as a singer. Even his most celebrated performance in The Continue reading
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WORLD WAR Z (Dir. Marc Forster, 2013, US) – The Infected
If John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids influenced the post apocalyptic trajectory of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s science fiction-horror 28 Days Later (2002) then it is a novel which reaches back to the past and affects the present day consciousness of Hollywood cinema. For a long time, the undead was fragmented from the Continue reading
Movie Mahal 