A Separate Peace (2004)
Filmmaker(s): Peter Yates
Four friends with one dark secret they could never outrun.
Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: 4:50 from Paddington (1987)
Filmmaker(s): Martyn Friend
Travelling on the 4.50 from Paddington, Mrs McGillicuddy witnesses a murder on a passing train - but where is the body?
12 Dec Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple: 4:50 from Paddington (1987)
Missed Train The Marple stories — many of them — are lessons in narrative placement. We start with the basic notion of the mystery narrator shuffling through multiple created realities looking for what makes sense. Marple turns that into the clever notion of detection as...
Seven-Up! (1964)
Filmmaker(s): Paul Almond
A group of British children aged 7 from widely ranging backgrounds are interviewed about a range of subjects. The filmmakers plan to re-interview them at 7 year intervals to track how their lives and attitudes change as they age.
08 Dec Seven-Up! (1964)
This did not start as a folded adventure. It is a quite ordinary TV documentary. But it became so in later installments by Apted, where the interviews are largely about how the films affected their lives.
Rehearsal for Murder (1982)
Where the curtain comes up on Terror
Filmmaker(s): David Greene
A year after his fiancée's death, a playwright schedules a rehearsal for his new play, which proves to be a trap for her killer.
06 Dec Rehearsal for Murder (1982)
Mixed Audiences God I love this stuff. What happens here: a playwright has his wife murdered. He assembles the suspects to read a new play, and this play concerns events that implicate each of them. Each of these suspects is placed under increasing pressure by...
How to Make a Monster (2001)
What started out as a simple game... became a virtual nightmare.
Filmmaker(s): George Huang
Video game developer Clayton Software enlists the talents of a misfit group of programmers to develop the scariest computer combat game: EVILUTION. With four weeks to bring the game to market and a million-dollar bonus on the line, they utilize a telemetry suit to render a 3-D version of the onscreen player. But when a power surge gives the hard drive a mind of its own, the suit comes to life to play the game for real and the programming team find themselves in the middle of a chilling virtual nightmare beyond their wildest imagination.
26 Nov How to Make a Monster (2001)
Makes Itself I have several movieland people I follow because what they do is pretty interesting. I have a (much larger) list of people that I follow casually because they show promise, or have done something interesting in the past. This little TeeVee movie popped...
The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988)
Filmmaker(s): Brian Mills
Sir Charles Baskerville dies on the moor under mysterious circumstances and rumors abound about a demonic hound. When the American heir arrives to take charge, a family friend calls in Holmes and Watson to get to the heart of the mystery.
25 Nov The Hound of the Baskervilles (1988)
The Elusive Core of the Genre If you want to understand film, you need to understand the three main narrative types: noir, that genre derived from the musical, and the detective story. While the detective story in film essentially means Agatha Christie, you can’t understand...
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson: King of Blackmailers (1980)
Filmmaker(s): Igor Maslennikov
Mycroft Holmes hands Sherlock Holmes the case of the Master Blackmailer.
19 Sep The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson: King of Blackmailers (1980)
Europe in Disguise This is a Russian TV production, closely following the Conan Doyle stories. Comments that I have seen accept it as a good version, mostly on the basis of the characterisations. But I find it dreadful, and credit two influences. The first is...- 1
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