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If Operation Mincemeat has got you in the mood for a Second World War story with more than a dash of the domestic, then this newly restored Studiocanal release based on a real-life sea raid is well worth a look. Compton Bennett already had a solid track record when he directed this, having been Oscar-nominated for King Solomon's Mines and he is helped enormously by skilful cinematography from Harry Waxman, who would go on to shoot The Wicker Man later in his career and whose employment of lighting and framing here adds enormously to the atmosphere generated when the men are on the boat that gives its film its title.

She is a pensioned-off US destroyer that has been brought out of mothballs to help out the British Navy for convoy work but who, through the course of the film, will come to perform a much more dangerous task. In.

During a three-hour discussion on a recent episode of “The Empire Film Podcast,” Edgar Wright and Quentin Tarantino revealed the existence of their makeshift quarantine movie club over the last 9 months. As Wright explained, “It’s nice. We’ve kept in touch in a sort of way that cinephiles do. It’s been one of the very few blessings of this [pandemic], the chance to disappear down a rabbit hole with the hours indoors that we have.” Tarantino added, “Edgar is more social than I am. It’s a big deal that I’ve been talking to him these past 9 months.”

A bulk of the film club was curated by none other than Martin Scorsese, who sent Wright a recommendation list of nearly 50 British films that Scorsese considers personal favorites. In the five months Wright spent in lockdown before resuming production on “Last Night in Soho” — and before he received the...

Robert Walker: Actor in MGM films of the '40s. Robert Walker: Actor who conveyed boy-next-door charms, psychoses At least on screen, I've always found the underrated actor Robert Walker to be everything his fellow – and more famous – MGM contract player James Stewart only pretended to be: shy, amiable, naive. The one thing that made Walker look less like an idealized “Average Joe” than Stewart was that the former did not have a vacuous look. Walker's intelligence shone clearly through his bright (in black and white) grey eyes. As part of its “Summer Under the Stars” programming, Turner Classic Movies is dedicating today, Aug. 9, '15, to Robert Walker, who was featured in 20 films between 1943 and his untimely death at age 32 in 1951. Time Warner (via Ted Turner) owns the pre-1986 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer library (and almost got to buy the studio outright in 2009), so most of Walker's movies have...

Jean Kent: British film star and ‘Last of the Gainsborough Girls’ dead at 92 (photo: actress Jean Kent in ‘Madonna of the Seven Moons’) News outlets and tabloids — little difference these days — have been milking every little drop from the unexpected and violent death of The Fast and the Furious franchise actor Paul Walker, and his friend and business partner Roger Rodas this past Saturday, November 30, 2013. Unfortunately — and unsurprisingly — apart from a handful of British publications, the death of another film performer on that same day went mostly underreported. If you’re not "in" at this very moment, you may as well have never existed. Jean Kent, best known for her roles as scheming villainesses in British films of the 1940s and Gainsborough Pictures’ last surviving top star, died on November 30 at West Suffolk Hospital in Bury St Edmunds, England. The previous day, she had suffered a fall at her...

James Mason movies Turner Classic Movies, Saturday, August 11 (Edt) 6:00 Am Lord Jim (1965). After turning coward, a naval officer tries to redeem himself by helping Asian natives stage a revolution. Director: Richard Brooks. Cast: Peter O’Toole, James Mason, Curt Jurgens. Color, 154 minutes. Letterbox. 8:45 Am Thunder Rock (1942). A disillusioned writer moves into a lighthouse where some ghostly visitors restore his faith. Director: Roy Boulting. Cast: Michael Redgrave, Barbara Mullen, James Mason. Black and white, 107 minutes. 11:00 Am The Seventh Veil (1945). A concert pianist with amnesia fights to regain her memory. Director: Compton Bennett. Cast: James Mason, Ann Todd, [...]...

Another sad entry in the criminal history of British barbering! For it is a remarkable fact that any time the protagonist of a Brit flick reaches for the straight razor or scoops out a handful of Brylcream, his fate is sealed and the gallows awaits. One need only think of Uno Henning in Anthony Asquith's luminous-black slice of English expressionism, A Cottage on Dartmoor (1929), or Eric Porter in Compton Bennett's Daybreak(1948), a British answer to French poetic realism and one of the saddest films ever made (reviewed for The Forgotten here).

Both those films represent clear (and successful) attempts to transplant essentially foreign modes of film-making onto British soil. On the Night of the Fire (1939) is something different: it gathers together all the key elements of the classic American noir, and plays them out in an unusual working class and regional setting, but it does so before Hollywood had encoded those genre principles.

Compton Bennett burst upon the British filmmaking scene in 1945 with The Seventh Veil, a weird, sado-masochistically-inflected semi-gothic love story which did much to boost the careers of Ann Todd (neurotic piano prodigy), James Mason (sadistic music teacher) and Herbert Lom (sympathetic psychotherapist). By 1960 he was working mainly in television, having sunk into a kind of middlebrow lethargy along with most British cinema. But in 1948, at the peak of UK cinematic creativity, he directed Daybreak, one of the few British noirs, and a bleaker story than many of the social realist dramas that followed Bennett's career in the sixties. In fact, as with many of the best downbeat stories, the movie somehow leaves the audience exhilarated, glad to be alive.

This is a movie which, as Sam Goldwyn might put it, begins at a hanging and descends deeper into misery from there. Eric Portman (best known perhaps as the sinister squire...

To celebrate its 20th Anniversary, it appears as though the Tiff Cinematheque is set to pull out all the stops.

According to Criterion, the Tiff, formerly known as the Cinematheque Ontario, will be bringing out a rather superb and cartoonishly awesome summer schedule, that will include films ranging from Kurosawa pieces, to films from Pier Paolo Pasolini. Other films include a month long series dedicated to James Mason, Eric Rohmer’s Six Moral Tales, a tribute to Robin Wood, and most interesting, a retrospective on the works of one Catherine Breillat.

Personally, while the Kurosawa, Pasolini, and Rohmer collections sound amazing, the Breillat series is ultimately the collective that I am most interested in. Ranging from films like the brilliant Fat Girl, to the superb and underrated Anatomy of Hell, these are some of the most interesting and under seen pieces of cinema of recent memory, and are more than...