Craig McCall | 82 mins | TV (HD) | 1.78:1 | UK / English | PG
Documentary telling the story of the career of cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff.
As the title implies, it focuses mainly on the former — despite the fact he directed 13 features, this part of his career is largely glossed over with a bit of discussion of one film, Sons and Lovers, which earnt some Oscar nominations (including one, slightly ironic, win). But that’s probably fine, because it’s for his work with the camera on films like A Matter of Life and Death, Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes and The African Queen that Cardiff is best known.
As a film, it doesn’t do anything fancy: talking heads, clips, photographs. There’s nothing wrong with that when your topic is engrossing and your content stands on its own. It’s a biography of Cardiff’s work, moving chronologically through his major contributions to cinema. The insights are numerous thanks to the number of films covered and a lot of footage from an interview with Cardiff himself. Though there are other interviewees, including some big names (just look at the list on IMDb), what Cardiff has to say of his own works dominates, which seems only proper.
My overriding memory of the documentary is of a slew of beautiful-looking films, some well known and others not, but every one jumping onto want-to-see lists thanks to what’s shown here. Which just demonstrates how deserving Cardiff and his work are of a dedicated feature film of this quality.
Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff is on Film4 and Film4 HD tonight at 1:20am, and Film4 +1 at 2:20am (of course).
Cameraman: The Life & Work of Jack Cardiff is on Film4 at 1:20pm.
The near future: most of mankind now lives through ‘surrogates’ — robots that look like perfect versions of ourselves (generally), which we control from elaborate machines sat around in our homes. The anonymity of the online world brought into the real one, essentially.
while almost every plot ‘twist’ is startlingly unsurprising (though it does manage one half decent one).
If you want to muse on what makes us human in a world of near-identical robotic replicas, watch 
A Good Woman adapts Oscar Wilde’s 1892 play Lady Windermere’s Fan, switching the setting to the Amalfi Coast in 1930. If one didn’t know better, one would believe that’s when and where it was always set.
So it seems one’s perception of the film lies in what it is compared to. Compared to Wilde’s original, it may indeed be a pale imitation, relocated to an inappropriate country and period, with lacklustre performances and incongruous Wilde-penned lines crowbarred in. Taken without the context of the work it’s adapted from, however, I thought it was a flawed but, more importantly, highly amusing film.
I saw the Richard Attenborough-starring 
Which, considering the whole story is about a man who thinks he’s Santa Claus, and whether or not he really is, is an impressively underhand piece of marketing.
You know how sometimes you see a bit of a movie on TV and you end up watching just long enough to get caught up so much you’re in for the long haul, no matter what the quality? No? Maybe it’s just me (usually around 
Like I said, daft and implausible. And that isn’t necessarily a problem, but as you watch Iron Eagle you can’t help but wonder if the filmmakers are trying to convince viewers it could be plausible. And it isn’t. Not in the slightest.
I’ve not seen that either, but I think we all know this is a serious step down. Poor man. His career went on to include 
It may be a bit of a cop out to begin a review by pointing you to another, but I must recommend 
Robert Newton’s Lukey. (You’ll also note Newton’s performance is criticised in Colin’s piece so, in aid of not sounding like I’m too easily influenced, I’d like to point out I didn’t make the connection between his comments and my own notes on Newton until afterwards.) Shell and Lukey have a bit of a point in the end, but I didn’t enjoy getting through them in comparison to the rest of the film.
The score, by William Alwyn, is really nice, particularly in certain places — for example when it begins to snow and Johnny wanders the streets, or at its most effective during the haunting climax, as Kathleen hauls a near-dead Johnny through the falling snow towards the safety of the shipyard as the police finally close in.
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If you’ve ever seen the miniseries 
Bigelow & co construct each ‘action’ sequence with care and attention. They’re not action sequences in the truest sense — suggestions from some that she’d be a great director for, say, Bond 23 on the strength of this film are unwarranted (not that she wouldn’t be good, but this film’s action does nothing in particular to demonstrate appropriate skills). Instead of the fast-paced bullets-flying adrenaline-pumping sequences you get from An Action Movie, The Hurt Locker offers up more realistic (at least, realistic-feeling) sequences of tension as characters approach bombs, watch increasingly suspicious crowds, try to defuse the situation before the timer runs out… It could be clichéd — we’ve all seen plenty of bomb defusing scenes in movies before now — but, again, there’s a sense of “this is how it is”, rather than “this is how movies portray it for dramatic effect”. Is it how it is? I don’t know. But it certainly still packs dramatic effect.
The opening quote and closing scenes make explicit the main theme — war is a drug, one James (Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner) is addicted to — but I’m not sure how present this is in the body of the story. Rather, the majority feels like an attempt to convey the experience of living as an explosives expert in a warzone, with James’ ‘addiction’ just a side effect of that. Perhaps, then, it’s making its point more subtly than by battering you round the head with cinematic cries of, “He’s addicted to war! It’s just a drug!”
100Films.co.uk 