Hail, Caesar!
Hail, Caesar!, the Coen Brothers’ latest, is more a series of entertaining vignettes than a movie. Which is fine, except you don’t realise this until halfway through, as there’s the semblance of a good plot being dangled in front of you for at least an hour. More than anything, it’s a love letter to old Hollywood; a satire on the things that never change by two superb filmmakers attuned to the beauty and inherent farce of making movies. To surmise, we find ourselves in Tinsel
Hitchcock/Truffaut
In our current age of unfettered veneration, it’s hard to imagine a time when Alfred Hitchcock was not considered one of the undisputed masters of cinema. Harder still to think he’d need anyone’s help in establishing himself as such. Yet in the sixties, Hitchcock’s commercial success, publicity stunts and condescending attitude to the press led critics to belittle his work as purely commercial and crowd-pleasing. He found unlikely champions, however, in the critics and filmma
