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Rear Window...Another Hitchcock classic

Advantages: suspense, brilliant acting directing
Disadvantages: none

This classic 1954 film is one of Alfred Hitchcock's most celebrated and enduringly popular films, famed for its incredible case and suspense, and when you watch it, it is easy to see why. Basically the film centres around a photographer called L.B Jeffries, played by the superb James Stewart, who is confined to his apartment due to having a broken leg. He spends a great deal of time looking out of his window, merely out of boredom and intrigue and ...
...building may have been murdered by her husband. This is an incredibly suspenseful, atmospheric and well acted film, with the vast majority of the film taking place in one room looking out into a courtyard. The performances from Stewart and the incomparable Grace Kelley make this incredibly easy to watch. Their relationship and the way in which it develops through their investigation of the suspected murder, is for me one of the highlights of the ...

adamp123 02.11.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Rear Window (DVD)

Someone is watching you!

Advantages: Great story and technically outstanding
Disadvantages: Lack of special features on the DVD

...across the way from the rear window of his Greenwich Village apartment complex. From his apartment he can see in to all the window and thus the 'lives' of the apartments facing him and in his own imagination he slowly gets to know the people making up names and stories for what their lives are like. He gradually becomes fascinated with on particular apartment where a middle aged couple live and soon he realises that a murder has been committed. No ...
...this purpose. In Rear Window Hitchcock plays with our emotions at first what Jeff is doing makes us feel uncomfortable, he is after all invading people's privacy, this is clearly wrong but we the audience are complicit in this activity we are also looking though Jeff's eye through his zoom lens and soon our curiosity overrides our sense of shame over being a 'peeping tom'. With such a claustrophobic setting and a small principle cast Hitchcock has ...

Mauri 02.07.2009 · Read full review
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Review of Rear Window (DVD)

Action-packed with some witty dialogue but still flawed somehow

Advantages: Quite thrilling when it gathers pace, seemed an authentic depiction of London, some humour
Disadvantages: Something about Downey Jnrs depiction of Holmes didnt work somehow, not for all ages/the squeamish

...Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson start out by catching a serial killer who dabbles in the the supernatural, an evil man called Lord Blackwood who is sentenced to death, indeed Watson confirms he's dead after he's hung. Things take a distinctly sinister turn, however, when they discover than Blackwood has apparently risen from the dead and Holmes recalls what he told him before he was hung, which indicated that more ...
...actor (Robert Downey Jnr.) played Sherlock Holmes, while an English actor (Jude Law), played his right hand man, Dr. Watson. Now of course I knew that before I went to see the movie, infact I quite like Robert Downey Jnr. as an actor and I have enjoyed some of his other movies and the fact that he plays the main character was one of the main reasons I wanted to see it in the cinema but there was something about him playing this role that I just didn't ...

IzzyS 27.12.2009 · Read full review
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Review of Sherlock Holmes

What goes around comes around..

Advantages: Enigmatic
Disadvantages: Perhaps too long

...I wouldn’t say this was in that impact category but certainly a quality piece of film. The drama begins with the return of thirty-something award winning war photographer Paul Harris (Mathew McFadden) to the small rural town of Steimer where he grew up, his first visit for 17 years. The night bag over the shoulder arrival is for dad’s funeral, mum long returned to the Earth, Paul’s relationship with big brother Andrew (Colin May) still not good after ...
...As per normal in these movies Paul has awakened ghosts from his and others past on his return, none more so than a long lost relationship with Penny (Miranda Otto), the reason, we discover later, he skipped town. Deciding to stick around and sort out the family estate, his brother begrudging Paul’s promised third of the Will & Testament, the rest going to an unnamed charity, things take an unexpected turn in his closed world with the arrival of a ...

thedevilinme 22.12.2009 · Read full review
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Review of In My Father's Den (DVD)

About as fun as being stuck in the Channel Tunel

Advantages: Acting
Disadvantages: Yawnnnnnnn

The dust-cover proudly states that this is the best film of the new millennium! They obviously haven’t seen Brazilian Girls Go Wild In Cancun then. I took both films up on their boasts and I can confirm there was only one winner—and I didn’t need the subtitles. Talk about over rated. I had heard good things about Hidden; it had won the Palm De Or` in Cannes no less. But it’s French and so that means its going to be very talky and actor centered, ...
...the limited and predictable script. For a movie pushed as a mysterious thriller the only mystery here is how it won anything, dribbling out to a very disappointing finish. One broadsheet even voted this film of the decade?? The movie opens with a single static shot of the front of one of those comfy urban secluded houses in a nice middle class Paris superb. From across the street we observe the house panacea and everyday movements in the street ...

thedevilinme 20.12.2009 · Read full review
Ciao members have rated this review on average: very helpful
Review of Hidden (DVD)