Scotland playing an attacking team against Brazil... LOOK TO THE SKIES, THEY'VE TAKEN STEVE CLARKE!!

One of the odder Woody Allen films. It is light, breezy, and satiric, but it is also his Catholic film, with a strange strain Somerset Maugham and magical realism. It is probably Allen's least coherent script as it wildly grabs at jazz, an affair, and Mother Theresa. But it still works, remarkably.

What happens at 11s is one of the greatest things I’ve ever seen in cinema.

Now a useful Letterboxd List. letterboxd.com/claxtondog/l...

Thought you might enjoy, David. Screwball has been my passion for decades; in 2023 (as I was transitioning from writing about classic TV to classic film), I wrote this essay, “defining” screwball & discussing my 25 faves. Quite a few are largely unknown. thatsallsiknow.blogspot.com/2023/02/the-...

Eephus was the perfect film for a hot afternoon (though it would be just as good in the golden light of an autumn evening or any weather really...) If you are in the UK you may have to find it through unorthodox means. letterboxd.com/marie_philli...

Name a film with a title that is a full sentence

Worth seeing for two sequences, the eyeball and the bee-face bits. Totally bizarre. Weirdly creepy. Also, Serena Grandi looks exactly like you would expect an actor called Serena Grandi to look, and Lamberto Bava is not shy about exploiting her to his camera. One of the sleaziest giallos.

Tonight's film

#NowPlaying Soundtrack of the week

"Thank you, fellow opera-lovers. It's been ten years since I elected myself president of this organisation... an' if I say so myself, you made the right choice." A timeless, peerless comedy. Billy Wilder's most frivolous, least cynical effort. Yet, all built around the St Valentine's Day Massacre.

Tonight's film

We will use the Culture budget for one year to buy the rights to The Heartbreak Kid from Bristol Myers Squibb, the pharmaceutical company.

Paul Henreid as a private eye seemed like a good proposition for a film, but I found Mantrap a pretty poor excuse for 80 minutes. A muddled plot, a really rubbish opening, and an ending that I didn't care about. Not a great film from Hammer!

The most accurate review of the very irritating The Ninth Configuration. letterboxd.com/claxtondog/f...

I am trying to clear my BBC iPlayer watchlist for the very first time. That is why I am about to watch the first episode of Little Dorrit at the height of summer.

I'm on a call with colleagues in London, Mexico, and Brazil, and there has been a lot of chat about the heat. Didn't have the heart to tell them it is 17 degrees and raining Edinburgh today.

Tonight's film

Well, Disclosure Day is great cinema, a really smashing time. I felt like I’d been picked up and carried away by something very powerful, swung about like a doll a few times, then finally set down safely but in a very different place from where I’d started. It is a full on experience

I had to unfollow someone on Letterboxd because this was their take on The Fog:

Almost 15 years ago and still no film treatment. This used to be a proper country www.bbc.com/news/uk-engl...

What a hilariously great free kick!!

1/6. First time watch of Fedora (Billy Wilder, 1978). I’ve been meaning to watch it ever since reading Jonathan Coe’s hugely enjoyable novel, Mr Wilder and Me, set during the film’s production. The film bombed on release, but in subsequent years has acquired a number of fans - and I’m one of them.

Genuinely quite strange. An auteurist statement from John Travolta. A reverie to his childhood, filled with early 1960s pop-optimism; a fetish for airplanes, and a bizarre tonal balance between child's eye view and knowing adulthood.

Tonight's film

I am going to need a bit of time considering what I made of Death in Venice. Other than, I wish I had seen it at the cinema. It has an all-encompassing mood and atmosphere, and you get completely sucked into the rather sickly patina. The overwhelming music, and Dirk Bogarde's striking performance.

Well, that was (mostly) amazing. Thank you. letterboxd.com/claxtondog/f...

I am going to need a bit of time considering what I made of Death in Venice. Other than, I wish I had seen it at the cinema. It has an all-encompassing mood and atmosphere, and you get completely sucked into the rather sickly patina. The overwhelming music, and Dirk Bogarde's striking performance.

This morning's film

SPRING NIGHT, SUMMER NIGHT (Joseph L. Anderson, 1967, rewatch). Desire, frustration, despair & rebellion simmer away in rural Ohio. There’s a raw, unpolished quality to the performances that feels very in keeping with the film’s subject matter, a story brimming with sexual tension >> (1/3) #FilmSky

A LA Private Eye film. An LA Private Eye film starring James Garner. Based on Raymond Chandler. A Marlowe. Bruce Lee as a polite heavy, who kicks the shit of rooms with martial arts. And more importantly with Rita Moreno as a stripper, and an Agatha Christie denoument during one her naked dances.

Re-subscribed to Apple TV to watch Sugar season 2. (And I guess Widow's Bay)

Tried to talk my daughter into seeing Toy Story 5. Her reply was "boys stuff" and she wasn't ever going to see it. Having listened to a podcast review, sounds like I dodged a bullet.

boxd.it/eRUtX3 Watched and enjoyed this today #FilmSky

Tonight's film

DISCLOSURE’S DAY: the direction is truly outstanding, Emily Blunt gives one of her best performance and the first half is riveting and tense, with an old-school quality to the storytelling, it’s as if Spielberg were adapting an early Stephen King that never existed.

September was released the same year as Radio Days, and I remembered it being the antithesis of Radio Days with its tight almost one-day structure, long takes and with very little humour. But it is actually often darkly funny. Crisp wry devastating one-liners.

Is that Poch or 2015 Russell Crowe?

Paul Bearer talking about the Kitchen Floor.

Tonight's film

HAPPY TOGETHER (Wong Kar-wai, 1997). My first rewatch since this film came out in the late 1990s. There’s such a strong attraction-repulsion dynamic here. Can’t live with him, can’t live without him! (1/2) #FilmSky

Hong Kong Frank Borzage. This is Johnnie To at his most romantic, cine-literate, and languidly paced. It doesn't all work, but the last 30 minutes is superbly considered. Plus, Sammi Cheng has amazing "I am seriously grieving" hair I've seen in a film. I might write more tomorrow...

Robin’s thread persuaded me to catch BOOGIE NIGHTS at the BFI this afternoon. What an exhilarating film this is, running the gamut from comedy to tragedy. I fell in love with it all over again! #FilmSky #BoogieNights #PTA

A film in one strand of Johnnie To's filmmaking - along with Needing You, Turn Left Turn Right, Yesterday Once More, Linger and Don't Go Breaking My Heart.

Hong Kong Frank Borzage. This is Johnnie To at his most romantic, cine-literate, and languidly paced. It doesn't all work, but the last 30 minutes is superbly considered. Plus, Sammi Cheng has amazing "I am seriously grieving" hair I've seen in a film. I might write more tomorrow...

There could not be two more diametrically opposed views of history than events & people portrayed in A MAN FOR ALL SEASONS & WOLF HALL. Yet I could not love both more; Robert Bolt frames his story as an analogy of the HUAC witch-hunt in the US, Mantel's is a tale of misogyny, class warfare &.... /1

Tonight's second film

Rylance is utterly brilliant as are the two series, which do a fabulous job of translating Hilary Mantel's dazzling prose to the screen; imperious.

"I knelt by his body...and I wept, and I prayed to God to send vengeance upon them all!" "There's no need to trouble God, George. I'll take it in hand." Mark Rylance ends episode two of Wolf Hall like Sly Stallone in 1985.

Interiors is about three sisters who have to come to terms with their parents separation. Their father leaves their emotionally and psychologically unstable mother to take up with a less difficult woman. This is essentially the whole plot, as it interweaves the fall-out amongst the family.