Category: Country: US
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Breakfast and Tiffany’s . Dir. Blake Edwards . Paramount Pictures . 1961.
In Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) Audrey Hepburn performs as Holly Golightly, formerly Lula Mae Barnes. We learn that Holly has moved to New York to reinvent herself. As a consequence, she has changed her name. By destabilising her identity, she demonstrates that she takes control of her life. When Paul Varjak (George Peppard) moves into her apartment…
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The Green Mile. Dir. Frank Darabont. Warner Bros. Pictures. 1999.
Adapted from Stephen King’s novel, The Green Mile tells the story of Paul Edgecomb, a prison guard on Death Row, and his relationship with John Coffey, a convicted of the rape and murder of two young girls. Large and burly in his physique, John arrives at the ‘Green Mile’ as a timid, deeply emotional man who doesn’t…
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Milking the Rhino. Dir. David E. Simpson. Kartemquin Films. 2009.
David E. Simpson’s 2009 documentary Milking the Rhino is a groundbreaking, astonishing story of two cattle farming cultures, the Maasai of Kenya and Ovahimba of Namibia, caught between trying to conserve their ancient traditions amid the growing pressure of modern wildlife conservation. They represent the largely unseen inhabitants of the wildlife documentary, the conveniently ignored…
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The Birds. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock. Universal Pictures. 1963.
The most horrifying horror of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds occurs in a single, fleeting instant. Thrown from the comfort and security of his own bed, we are allowed only a glimpse of the aftermath of a brutal attack by these inscrutable creatures, where what has happened just moments before is almost too awful to imagine. As the…
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The Ugly Dachshund. Dir. Norman Toker . Walt Disney. 1966.
The Ugly Dachshund (1966), adapted from the 1938 novel by Gladys Bonwyn Stern, begins as Mark Garrison (Dean Jones) frantically prepares to drive to the hospital. This tricks us in to thinking that his wife, Fran Garrison (Suzanne Pleshette), is going to give birth when in fact they are taking their Dachshund Danke to the animal…
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Fantastic Mr. Fox. Dir. Wes Anderson. 20th Century Fox . 2009.
2009 saw Wes Anderson turn his unique eye for detail and style to stop motion animation, with his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. The film has a distinct and consistent colour scheme of warm oranges and browns, changing only to show the warehouses and homes of the evil farmers Boggis, Bunce and Bean.…
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Into The Wild. Dir. Sean Penn. Paramount Vantage. 2007.
It’s 1992, and Christopher McCandless, reborn as Alexander Supertramp, embarks on a ‘rite of passage for a young man in search of meaning,’[1] escaping from the human world and into the Alaskan wilderness. A ‘vagabond loner’[2] who donates his college fund to Oxfam and abandons his worldly goods by the side of the road, Alex forges relationships with the…
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Born Free. Dir. James Hill. Columbia Pictures. 1966.
Born Free deals with the contradictory question of how to demonstrate the behaviour of a wild animal in a tame, domestic environment. Through an exploration of the binaries between wild and tame, domestic and barbarous, Elsa’s hamartia is revealed; she is too wild to be a tame pet, but too tame to be a wild…
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Never Cry Wolf. Dir. Carrol Ballard. Buena Vista Distribution. 1983.
Carroll Ballard’s 1983 adaptation of Farley Mowat’s 1963 dramatised autobiography Never Cry Wolf is as intricate and astonishingly baffling as it is brilliant. The film tells the story of biologist Tyler and his time in the Canadian arctic where he has volunteered to take part in a scientific study of wolves, largely considered by the…