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On a recent morning in Cannes, Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan sat over coffee at the Hotel Martinez and recalled a phone call he received nearly 60 years ago, not long after he’d made a splash on the British folk scene. On the other end of the line was a rising screenwriter and director called Ken Loach. “He said he was making his first feature…and would I help him with the music?” Donovan told Variety.

The film, a kitchen sink drama called “Poor Cow,” based on a novel by British playwright and author Neil Dunn, tells the story of a working-class single mother leading a hard-luck life in the slums of London. It’s a movie that set the tone for the type of social drama that propelled Loach throughout a remarkable, prolific career.

This week at the Cannes Film Festival, Loach will bow what he says will be his final film,...

Moore Milk, Please.

After wrapping up 2022 with a discussion of Carter Smith’s Into the Dark entry “Midnight Kiss“, we kicked off 2023 with a re-do of one of our earliest episodes on Richard Shepard’s The Perfection. Now, we’re talking about what Wes Craven dubbed “the scariest film of 1995” in Todd Haynes‘ AIDS allegory Safe, which boasts an astonishing performance from Julianne Moore.

The 1987-set Safe follows Carol White (Moore) a suburban housewife in Los Angeles, whose monotonous life is abruptly changed when she becomes sick with a mysterious illness caused by the environment around her.

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Episode 212: Safe (1995)

Why do you think you’re sick? Well you better find out because we’re discussing Todd...

Ib Melchior’s best-directed movie is a futuristic space opera with a time travel theme, all done at a production level suitable for a Halloween fun house. Yet its talented crew comes up with exciting visuals to match Melchior’s flaky-but-fun eclecticism: Androids, Mutants, ‘deviants,’ hydroponic gardens, force fields, time warps… and a sexist attitude or two to remind us that we’re seeing 2071 through the eyes of 1964. And it’s one of the earliest Hollywood credits for cameramen Vilmos Zsigmond and Laszlo Kovacs.

The Time Travelers

Blu-ray

Scorpion Releasing / Kino Lorber

1964 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 84 min. / Street Date April 27, 2021 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95

Starring: Preston Foster, Philip Carey, Merry Anders, John Hoyt, Dennis Patrick, Joan Woodbury, Delores Wells, Steve Franken, Forrest J. Ackerman, Peter Strudwick, Wayne Anderson .

Cinematography: William Zsigmond (Vilmos Zsigmond)

Camera Operator: Leslie Kovacs (Laszlo Kovacs)

Lumichord Effects: Oskar Fischinger

Visual Effects: David L. Hewitt

Assistant directors: Lew Borzage,...

Close-Up is a feature that spotlights films now playing on Mubi. Ken Loach's Poor Cow is showing on Mubi starting January 9, 2021 in the United Kingdom in the series First Films First.An aesthetic of Swinging London is established only to have its seams split in Poor Cow, Ken Loach’s first feature film from 1967. Donovan’s melancholic soundtrack is spiked with bright British Invasion b-sides, London’s industrial neighborhoods filmed in pop-art palettes, and Joy, played by Carol White, is lucent blonde with a fringe and bouffant. Halfway into the film, dressed in a mod-print floral housecoat, Joy finds her bouffant hair-piece destroyed, unhelpfully washed by her toddler as she overslept. The deflated hair-piece which Joy despairingly “can’t go out without!” and cost her “five and eleven” demarks Joy’s status in the narrative; a single, working-class mother with no way to get by but her looks. It...

With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]...

With Todd Haynes’s classic Safe now streaming on Criterion Channel (and seeming utterly prescient in its concerns), we’re reposting our Summer, 1995 cover story: Larry Gross’s interview with Haynes. — Editor Todd Haynes, director of Sundance Grand Prize Winner Poison and the underground classic Superstar, was inspired to make his latest feature, Safe, by his visceral response to New Age recovery therapists who tell the physically ill that they have made themselves sick, that they are responsible for their own suffering. Carol White, played superbly by Julianne Moore, is an archetypally banal homemaker in the San Fernando Valley who one […]...

With readers turning to their home viewing options more than ever, this daily feature provides one new movie each day worth checking out on a major streaming platform.

Beneath the glassy surfaces of nearly every Todd Haynes’ movie lives a woman pressing against them, about to break out. Julianne Moore has played two of those: a suburban housewife chained to the social order of racially segregated 1950s Connecticut in “Far From Heaven,” and as another psychically shackled housewife, this time in 1980s Southern California, in “Safe.”

More from IndieWireStream of the Day: How 'Ganja & Hess' Became Much More Than a Black Vampire StoryStream of the Day: Sofia Coppola's 'Bling Ring' Knows What It's Like to Feel Disconnected

Though released in 1995, “Safe” is set in 1987, at the height of the AIDS epidemic in America. Haynes’ roots as a queer filmmaker often find him responding to that crisis, most...

There’s something fitting about the fact that Carlo Mirabella-Davis’ “Swallow” — a provocative and frequently brilliant thriller about the patriarchal control over female bodies — is set in a purgatorial stretch of upstate New York that’s roughly equidistant from both Jeanne Dielman’s home at 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels, and the arid San Fernando Valley that almost suffocates Carol White to death in “Safe.” While he might not possess Chantal Akerman’s visionary patience, or exhibit Todd Haynes’ singular talent for mining horror from metaphor, Mirabella-Davis has crafted a sharp and surprising modern fable around a woman whose environment has been weaponized against her since birth.

The submissive but subtly demented housewife of a standard-issue Patrick Bateman wannabe (Austin Stowell), Hunter spends her days trapped in the gilded cage of a glass home they share along the Hudson River. Portrayed by an extraordinary Haley Bennett — whose forced smile of a lead...

Maxine Peake is magnificent in Adrian Shergold’s unflinching drama about a standup on the 70s northern club circuit

There are several moments in this astringently uncomfortable tragicomedy – which boasts a blistering central performance by Maxine Peake – that will leave audiences squirming and divided. Funny Cow follows the changing fortunes of a standup comic finding her feet in the northern working men’s clubs of the 70s. It has been described by writer and co-star Tony Pitts as “an unblinking obituary” and “unsentimental commentary” on the culture in which he grew up. Some will be shocked by Peake’s “Funny Cow” (we know her only by her stage name), winning round hostile audiences with un-pc gags that were once the backbone of the British club circuit. Others will simply nod in resigned recognition at this hard-knocks world in which “it’s not about being funny, it’s about surviving”.

There...

Swap a dwarfed existence in shrink-wrapped suburbia for a never-ending news diet of jaw-dropping political quandaries and it’s never felt easier to relate with Carol White’s environmental illness in Todd Haynes’ [safe]. With each passing revelation in Washington, security seems to slip away by the minute, sober comfort appears more elusive to find, and a nagging sense of restlessness rules the day.

So for those of you clamoring to unclutter your mind for just a few blissed-out minutes – at the risk of prescribing pseudo-guru dogma in the great outdoors – allow Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges to lull you along a trip of grounded meditation to “Temescal Canyon” from his 2015 album of ambient soundscapes Sleeping Tapes. Just be sure not to operate any heavy machinery while doing so.

Kenji Mizoguchi, Jirí Brdecka tributes planned for 52nd edition.

The 52nd Karlovy Vary International Film Festival (June 30 - July 8) will present a Crystal Globe for outstanding contribution to world cinema to British director Ken Loach.

The award will be shared with his long-time screenwriter Paul Laverty. The pair have collaborated on twelve feature films and two shorts, including The Wind That Shakes The Barley and more recently the Palme d’Or and Bafta-winning I, Daniel Blake.

Loach has a long and fruitful relationship with the Karlovy Vary festival. In 1968, his feature debut Poor Cow won a special jury prize and best actress for its star Carol White. A year later, his second film Kes won the festival’s Crystal Globe, and he has been a guest at the festival on numerous occasions since.

Poor Cow

Karlovy Vary will also celebrate the work of composer James Newton Howard, whose credits include Pretty Woman, The Sixth Sense, [link...

By Tim Greaves

Director John Mackenzie's powerful and captivating 1972 kitchen sink drama Made has been given the opportunity to find a new audience via a tasty UK Blu-Ray release from Network Distributing.

Valerie Marshall (Carol White) is a single mother eking out a meagre living as a London telephone exchange operator whilst simultaneously caring for her multiple-sclerosis-stricken mother (Margery Mason). Seemingly destined never to find true happiness and weary of the inapposite attentions of would-be suitors, Valerie agrees to assist priest and family friend Father Dyson (John Castle) in chaperoning a bunch of underprivileged youths on a day trip to the seaside. There she meets folk singer Mike Preston (Roy Harper), whose outwardly relaxed approach to life just might pave her way to salvation.

A slightly ponderous and largely dispiriting snapshot of early 1970s lower class Britain, I'll openly confess that when I first saw Made I was convinced it would leave me cold.

★★★★☆ 1967 was the year of Carry On Doctor, Quatermass and the Pit and two James Bond movies. It also saw the feature debut of acclaimed television director Kenneth Loach with Poor Cow, starring Terence Stamp, fresh from his first brush of Hollywood fame and Carol White, who had starred in the television drama Cathy Comes Home that had propelled both its star and director into the national limelight. Based on Nell Dunn's novel - Loach had used her work before in another Wednesday Play Up the Junction - Poor Cow tells the story of Joy (White), a working class young mother whose progress through life seems beset with woes.

Released in 1967, Poor Cow was Ken Loach’s first cinema feature, after a string of successful TV productions. Adapted from a novel by Nell Dunn (whose earlier short story collection, Up the Junction, had already been filmed by Loach), Poor Cow featured Terence Stamp as a robber who starts a relationship with a single mother, played by Carol White (who again had previously collaborated with Loach, on Cathy Come Home). Poor Cow is released on 24 June, with Terence Stamp and Nell Dunn attending a preview screening on 23 June at the Barbican, London

• Warning: this clip contains scenes of domestic violence

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'The Fixer' movie with Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde and Ian Holm (background) 'The Fixer' movie review: 1968 anti-Semitism drama wrecked by cast, direction, and writing In 1969, director John Frankenheimer declared that he felt "better about The Fixer than anything I've ever done in my life." Considering Frankenheimer's previous output – Seven Days in May, the much admired The Manchurian Candidate – it is hard to believe that the director was being anything but a good P.R. man for his latest release. Adapted from Bernard Malamud's National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (itself based on the real story of Jewish brick-factory worker Menahem Mendel Beilis), The Fixer is an overlong, overblown, and overwrought contrivance that, albeit well meaning, carelessly misuses most of the talent involved while sadistically abusing the patience – and at times the intelligence – of its viewers. John Frankenheimer overindulges in 1960s kitsch John Frankenheimer...

All week our writers will debate: Which was the greatest film year of the past half century. Click here for a complete list of our essays. When I picked this year, it was under the mistaken assumption that we were writing on the best film of a year, and not the best film year in general. But having realized the mistake, I stand by my choice. 1995 is still the best! Straight up: 1995 wins, because Todd Haynes’s “[Safe]" is still my favorite film to have come out since, Idk, I’ve been alive. It’s deeply self-conscious about genre, while still managing to not really resemble anything I’ve ever seen. It’s the perfect film about L.A.; about how space is mobilized in cinema; about the environment; about Gothic horror; about white femininity; about film bodies; about falling in love in the movies. It’s Todd Motherf*#@$^ Haynes’s best film.

Todd Haynes receives his first entry in the Criterion collection with a beautiful restoration of his landmark 1995 sophomore feature, Safe, the film that launched the status of burgeoning star Julianne Moore. Though initial reactions to the film were perplexing after a premiere at the Sundance Film Festival, a growing cult following cemented the film’s reputation as a fascinating example of Haynes’ remarkable control of mise en scene, as well as a deliberately refined AIDs allegory ahead of its time. Recuperated famously as a case study as pertains to practices and definitions of whiteness, it may very well be Haynes’ most invigorating work precisely because of all the avenues of projection its fascinating obliqueness provides.

The narrative is relatively simple, especially as pertains to the work of Haynes, who often prizes experimental, non-linear narratives. A suburban housewife residing in the San Fernando Valley of 1987, Carol White (Julianne Moore) finds herself...

The 1988 Dutch thriller The Vanishing hit Blu-ray this week, thanks to the good folks at Criterion. Without a drop of gore, it’s the perfect centerpiece for an All Saints’ Eve frightfest that shivers the soul but doesn’t turn the stomach. And why not round out that scare-a-thon with four more examples of great, relatively bloodless movies that go for your soul instead of your jugular? Here's a list of suggestions. (And if you're looking for more traditional horror flicks, consider perusing our carefully-curated Horror Quintessentials lists.) The Vanishing (1988) The horror genre tends to be about as subtle as...

Blu-ray & DVD Release Date: Dec. 9, 2014

Price: DVD $29.95, Blu-ray $39.95

Studio: Criterion Collection

Julianne Moore in Safe

In the 1995 drama Safe, Julianne Moore (Don Jon) gives a breakthrough performance as Carol White, a Los Angeles housewife in the late 1980s who comes down with a debilitating illness. After the doctors she sees can give her no clear diagnosis, she comes to believe that she has frighteningly extreme environmental allergies.

A profoundly unsettling work from the great American director Todd Haynes (Velvet Goldmine), Safe functions on multiple levels: as a prescient commentary on self-help culture, as a metaphor for the AIDS crisis, as a drama about class and social estrangement, and as a horror film about what you cannot see. This revelatory drama was named the best film of the 1990s in a Village Voice poll of more than fifty critics.

The Blu-ray and DVD of Safe contain the following features:

• New 4K digital restoration,...

Criterion has announced their new list of releases coming to shelves December 2014 and it's definitely not the flashiest of line-ups and, in fact, a rather limited one as it contains only three new Criterion titles along with one new edition to their Eclipse brand. First off we have Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits arriving on December 9. Previously released by Criterion on Laserdisc, the film now makes the jump to DVD and Blu-ray with a new 2K digital restoration and a new piece exploring the creation of the film's various historical periods and fantasy worlds along with previously released features such as an audio commentary and interviews. In this fantastic voyage through time and space from Terry Gilliam, a boy named Kevin (Craig Warnock) escapes his gadget-obsessed parents to join a band of time-traveling dwarves. Armed with a map stolen from the Supreme Being (Ralph Richardson), they plunder treasure from Napoleon...

Terence Stamp Finds His Song

By Alex Simon

One of the iconic actors and faces of London’s “swinging” sixties; Terence Stamp was discovered by actor/director Peter Ustinov for the titular role in his adaptation of Melville’s “Billy Budd” in 1962. The Cockney lad from London’s notorious Bow district was thrust into the limelight almost overnight, becoming a symbol of the English working class “intelligentsia,” which helped shape that decade’s pop culture. Along with game-changers like Joe Orton, (Stamp’s former roommate) Michael Caine, and the Beatles, Stamp et al proved to the world that one needn’t have graduated with a First from Oxford to make a mark on the world.

Terence Stamp marked his 50th year in show business with the release of last year’s “Unfinished Song,” being released today on DVD and Amazon Instant Video by Anchor Bay Entertainment. Stamp plays grumpy pensioner Arthur Harris,...

Alec Guinness: Before Obi-Wan Kenobi, there were the eight D’Ascoyne family members (photo: Alec Guiness, Dennis Price in ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’) (See previous post: “Alec Guinness Movies: Pre-Star Wars Career.”) TCM won’t be showing The Bridge on the River Kwai on Alec Guinness day, though obviously not because the cable network programmers believe that one four-hour David Lean epic per day should be enough. After all, prior to Lawrence of Arabia TCM will be presenting the three-and-a-half-hour-long Doctor Zhivago (1965), a great-looking but never-ending romantic drama in which Guinness — quite poorly — plays a Kgb official. He’s slightly less miscast as a mere Englishman — one much too young for the then 32-year-old actor — in Lean’s Great Expectations (1946), a movie that fully belongs to boy-loving (in a chaste, fatherly manner) fugitive Finlay Currie. And finally, make sure to watch Robert Hamer’s dark comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets...

Michael Winner: Death Wish director has died Michael Winner, best remembered for directing the Charles Bronson action hit Death Wish, died earlier today at his home in Kensington, London. According to reports, Winner had been suffering from (an unspecified) liver disease. He was 77. (Photo: Michael Winner.) Born in London (on Oct. 30, 1935) to a well-to-do family of Eastern European Jews — his father was Russian, his mother was Polish — Winner studied law and economics at Cambridge University. Following a stint as a gossip columnist (reportedly at the age of 14), he proceeded to study journalism and film criticism. He began working in the field in the mid-’50s. Michael Winner movies Michael Winner’s directorial career also took off in the mid-’50s, when he began directing several documentary and live-action shorts, a couple of which featured well-known names such as A.E. Matthews and Dennis Price. Winner progressed to features in the early ’60s,...

Michael Winner has died at the age of 77. The film director's wife Geraldine confirmed news of his passing today (January 21). "Michael was a wonderful man, brilliant, funny and generous," she said. "A light has gone out in my life." Born in Hampstead, London in 1935, Winner directed several British movies in the 1960s, including 1967's I'll Never Forget What'sisname, which starred Oliver Reed, Carol White and Orson Welles. From the 1970s, he made several projects in America, and was perhaps best known for vigilante revenge thriller Death Wish, made with Charles Bronson in 1974. The movie spawned several sequels.

[Michael Winner and his wife Geraldine] After he retired as a film director and producer, Winner became a food critic for The Sunday Times. Winner admitted to researching assisted suicide (more)...

British filmmaker Ken Loach has been around for nearly half a century, starting as a television director in England before his first feature, Poor Cow, starring Carol White and Terence Stamp, in 1967. And in all that time, the man’s never broken out into the mainstream, nowhere near a household name in any household outside of his immediate country and the lovely South of France, where he won the Palme d’Or a few years back for his small wartime masterpiece The Wind That Shakes The Barley.

This is an artist who has boldly refused to compromise his creative vision, and that vision is in proper display here, with The Angel’s Share. These days, Loach usually alternates between ultra-serious and decidedly light-hearted social commentary; this new film sits in the latter group. Starring Paul Brannigan as Robbie, a thug with a heart of gold, Loach digs into the current...

Actor-director-producer-screenwriter Zalman King, among whose credits are "scandalous" sex dramas such as Nine 1/2 Weeks, Two Moon Junction, and Wild Orchid, died of cancer earlier today. King reportedly was 69 years old. Born Zalman Lefkovitz in Trenton, New Jersey, King began his show business career as an actor, appearing in small roles and bit parts in about 20 television shows during the 1960s, including Gunsmoke, The Man from the U.N.C.L.E., Bonanza, and The Munsters. In the '70s and early '80s, he had supporting roles and a handful of leads in about a dozen movies, among them James B. Harris' provocative variation on the Sleeping Beauty theme, Some Call It Loving (1973), with Carol White; Jeff Lieberman's horror thriller Blue Sunshine (1975), as an innocent man accused of murdering several women; and Lee Grant's family drama Tell Me a Riddle (1980), starring Melvyn Douglas and Lila Kedrova. In the early '80s,...

"Standing outside his small-town Ohio home, his wife and child busy preparing breakfast inside, Curtis Laforche (Michael Shannon) looks up at the ominous slate-gray sky in the first scene of Take Shelter," begins Melissa Anderson in the Voice. "The clouds open, raining down oily piss-colored droplets. It's end-of-days weather, a phenomenon that only Curtis seems to witness, and the first of many private, impressively CGI'd apocalyptic visions to come. Like Carol White, the central, unglued character of Todd Haynes's Safe (1995) who is 'allergic to the 20th century,' blue-collar worker Curtis is haunted by one of the looming terrors of the 21st: financial ruin. This unarticulated fear triggers Curtis's mental illness, and despite a few missteps, Take Shelter powerfully lays bare our national anxiety disorder — a pervasive dread that Curtis can define only as 'something that's not right.'"

"Convinced the end is coming," writes James Rocchi at the Playlist,...

Although it was first broadcast 45 years ago, this tale of a descent into homelessness resonates with our current crisis

There is little that the viewer can do to distract from the remorseless conclusion of Cathy Come Home, the 1960s television drama about one young family's descent into homelessness, now screening at London's Southbank Centre as part of the BFI's month-long Ken Loach retrospective.

Even the actress Carol White's hair seems to mirror her character's inexorable pitch into poverty, first a gleaming golden halo as she promenades with her fiance Reg in a dappled park, then the neat bob of a housewife and mother, initially flourishing in a posh maisonette with double glazing, then struggling with vermin and bailiffs in a series of increasingly overcrowded and dingy abodes following her husband's sudden unemployment. The luminous crown ends in dull, sullen strands as she is shunted with her children from one hostel to another and,...

London, July 7: Charlotte Moss, the teenage sister of Kate Moss has been lauded as a star in the making after she was spotted at her sister's wedding recently.

Charlotte, 13, known affectionately as Lottie, could follow in her supermodel sister's footstep, after agent Carol White, who famously turned down Kate, said that she is a "beautiful and fresh" face for the future.

"Lottie.

Film director whose career took him from gritty television plays to Hollywood thrillers

People who talk wistfully of the "golden age of British television drama" are often accused of viewing the past through the rosy lens of nostalgia. But a clear-eyed examination of the era proves that such slots as the BBC's The Wednesday Play (1964-70) and Play for Today (1970-84) were unsurpassed as breeding grounds for talented directors such as John Mackenzie, who has died after a stroke aged 83. Like most of his contemporaries who gained their experience by working in television – Philip Saville, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Ken Loach, Mike Newell, Michael Apted and Mike Leigh – Mackenzie went on to make feature films, notably his superb London-based gangster picture, The Long Good Friday (1980).

The television background trained Mackenzie to work quickly on taut and realistic narratives, within a tight budget and on schedule. One of his first jobs was as...

Stage Door will now be a weekly Tuesday series featuring Nathaniel's (or other contributors') theatrical adventures and, as often as possible, how they do connect or could connect with the cinema. So pardon this Monday entry, and subsequent double dip, but 'tis the season; we'll do this again tomorrow for the Tony Award Nominations! But today... a few notes on Marie & Bruce, the current revival of the play with Marisa Tomei (it closes this coming weekend) and the movie version with Julianne Moore.

I mentioned the play briefly before. It opens with Marie and Bruce in bed. Marie is unable to sleep and proceeds to talk herself in circles, spewing bile towards her sleeping husband whom she apparently hates and plans to leave that very day. She tells us about his prized typewriter which she threw away and complains that it's a hot summer, they've both had the flu, and neither of them have jobs.

The Fixer (1968) Direction: John Frankenheimer Cast: Alan Bates, Dirk Bogarde, Georgia Brown, Hugh Griffith, Elizabeth Hartman, Ian Holm, David Opatoshu, David Warner, Carol White Screenplay: Dalton Trumbo; from Bernard Malamud's 1966 novel Oscar Movies Alan Bates, Ian Holm (background), Dirk Bogarde, The Fixer In 1969, director John Frankenheimer declared that he felt "better about The Fixer than anything I've ever done in my life." Considering Frankenheimer's previous output — Seven Days in May, the much admired The Manchurian Candidate — it is hard to believe that the director was being anything but a good PR man for his latest release. Adapted from Bernard Malamud's National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning novel (which itself was based on the real story of Jewish bricklayer Mendel Beiliss), The Fixer is an overlong, overblown, and overwrought contrivance that, albeit well meaning, carelessly misuses most of the talent involved while sadistically abusing the patience (and at...

This rare Hollywood risk-taker is currently starring in The Kids Are All Right, a comedy about lesbian parents. She talks here about feminism, family and how moving to Europe changed her life

In many of Julianne Moore's best films there comes a trademark moment when her eyes squint, mist over, and the mask that her character has been wearing slips decisively. Cue, the great unravelling. It's there in Boogie Nights, when Amber Waves, a porn star with thwarted maternal instincts, gets high and starts shattering on screen, her misty eyes combining with a brittle, metallic laugh that sounds oddly like a death rattle. It's there in Magnolia, when Linda Partridge realises too late that she actually loves the dying husband she married for money, and breaks down in a chemist's: "You have the balls, the indecency to ask me a question about my life," she bellows at the pharmacist,...

Cinematographer who honed his style on Ken Loach's innovative TV dramas

The cinematographer Tony Imi, who has died aged 72, was instrumental in pioneering a new style of filming television drama in the 1960s, before he moved on to feature films. Few could forget the misfortunes that befell a homeless young couple and their children in Cathy Come Home, a programme that shocked the nation and was instrumental in the formation of the charity Shelter.

Imi's handheld camera, on the move and close up to the action, made the story chillingly real, in the vein of a current affairs programme, rather than fiction. Cathy Come Home, screened as part of the groundbreaking Wednesday Play series by the BBC in 1966, proved that TV drama could be relevant to the lives of people in Britain.

The director, Ken Loach, was in the early days of establishing his method of social-realist film-making – shooting...

When you sit down to a horror film, you know, at least on a basic level, what you're getting into. Whether or not the movie delivers, what you've been promised, and what you're braced for or looking forward to, are scares. Which is why, when we look back on those truly traumatic movie memories, the titles that come to mind often are not horror films at all.

The most frightening movie moments can arrive out of nowhere, in the midst of where they shouldn't belong, catching you when you're vulnerable -- which is why there are a few alleged children's films on this list. But they can also creep up on you, working a different kind of dread, which is where some of the documentaries included below fit in. Fear is a funny thing. It comes in different varieties, it can work its way on you in unanticipated, and, as our collection here proves,...

I am obsessive by nature but somehow I never caught the collecting memorabilia bug. I have none and I rarely get excited about something unless it's super personal -- like the water bottle a friend of mine snatched after a Julianne Moore function. Her lips had touched it! I swear I did not ask my friend to do this -don't judge! -- so I have no idea why I'm suddenly all into the idea of owning one of a kind sculpted movie dolls or how long this sudden urge will last but...

How great are these Rosemary's Baby dolls?

They're made by sculptor/actress Alesia Newman-Breen. (Here's her blog) At this moment I feel like I would give up several gallons of plasma or perhaps donate my whole body to science to have one of Michelle Pfeiffer as Susie Diamond or Julianne Moore as Carol White in [safe] (That'd transfer so spookily well to doll form,...