Archive
WINTERSET – Nathaniel Shilkret
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Playwright Maxwell Anderson was profoundly disturbed by the highly controversial execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti in 1927. He drew inspiration from the event and wrote Winterset in 1935 as a poetic and dramatic exploration of the aftermath of a similar injustice. A 1935 stage production was a massive hit, winning the very first New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Given its success, RKO Pictures bought the screen rights to capitalize on its prestige with a film version. Pandro S. Berman was assigned as producer with a budget of $400,000, Alfred Santell was tasked with directing, and Anthony Veiller would write the screenplay. RKO decided to recruit most of the Broadway cast for the film. Burgess Meredith would star as Mio Romagna, joined by Margo as Miriamne Esdras, Eduardo Cianelli as Trock Estrella, John Carradine as Bartolomeo Romagna, Paul Guilfoyle as Garth Esdras, Maurice Moscovitch as Papa Esdras, and Edward Ellis as Judge Gaunt. Read more…
THE GENERAL DIED AT DAWN – Werner Janssen
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
In 1936 Paramount Pictures came upon an unpublished manuscript by novelist Charles G. Booth inspired by the real-life exploits of Morris “Two-Gun” Cohen. Cohen was a colorful, British-born Jewish adventurer who traveled to China and became a general in the National Revolutionary Army. He served as the personal bodyguard to Sun Yat-sen, leader of the 1911 revolution that toppled the Qing Dynasty. The studio was impressed, purchased the film rights, and signed Booth to a multi-film writing deal. William LeBaron was assigned to the production, Oscar-winning director Lewis Milestone was recruited, and Booth would collaborate with Clifford Odets to write the screenplay. The studio wanted marquee star power for the film, so Gary Cooper would star as O’Hara, joined by Madeleine Carroll as Judy Pierre, Akim Tamiroff as General Yang, Dudley Digges as Mr. Wu, Porter Hall as Peter Pierre, and Philip Ahn as Oxford. Read more…
ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER – Jonny Greenwood
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the most popular and critically acclaimed movies of 2025, One Battle After Another is a black comedy action-thriller written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, loosely inspired by Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Bob Ferguson, a former left-wing political revolutionary from an underground militant group called the French 75. Early in the film, the French 75 carry out a bold operation at the Mexico–US border, freeing apprehended immigrants and sparking conflict with ruthless military officer Steven Lockjaw (Sean Penn), who has a bizarre sexual obsession with Bob’s partner Perfidia Beverly Hills (Teyana Taylor). After Perfidia is arrested for murder, Lockjaw arranges for her to avoid prison in exchange for ratting out her comrades, forcing Bob to flee. Sixteen years later, Bob is living off-grid, paranoid, and raising his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti) far from the revolution. Things change for Bob when a still-obsessed Lockjaw discovers his location, and he and Willa are separated. Desperately trying to rescue his daughter, Bob is forced to get back in touch with his old French 75 compatriots – including Sergio St. Carlos (Benicio del Toro), a martial arts instructor who also runs underground support networks – before Lockjaw finds her. Read more…
HAMNET – Max Richter
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Director Chloe Zhao’s film Hamnet, which is based on the 2020 novel by Maggie O’Farrell, is a lyrical reimagining of the brief life and death of Hamnet Shakespeare, the son of the legendary poet and writer William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes “Anne” Hathaway, musing on the fact that his passing may have inspired the creation of one of the greatest works of literature in history. The story centers mostly on Agnes, who is portrayed as a perceptive, intuitive woman with a deep connection to nature; the first half of the film looks at Agnes and William’s early courtship, their subsequent marriage, and offers a portrait of family life in Elizabethan England circa 1580, following the birth of their twin children Hamnet and Judith. In time William begins traveling to London to write and perform his plays, but eventually the spread of plague brings sickness to the Shakespeare household, and Judith falls gravely ill. Hamnet, who has been charged by his father with looking after the family in his absence, desperately attempts to help her, and asks God if he can swap places with her; Judith eventually recovers, but Hamnet contracts the plague too, and dies aged just eleven. After Hamnet’s death, the story then explores how Agnes and William grieve differently: Agnes’s sorrow is visceral and consuming, while William channels his grief into his work. Read more…
FRANKENSTEIN – Alexandre Desplat
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
It’s astonishing to think that there have been more than 50 cinematic adaptations of the story of Frankenstein since it was first penned, one haunted summer in 1818, by the then 20-year-old English author Mary Shelley. In writing Frankenstein Shelley essentially invented the science fiction literary genre as we know it; before Frankenstein, stories about the unnatural or the fantastic were usually supernatural, rooted in magic, myth, or divine intervention. Shelley’s innovation was to ground the creation of life in the science of the time, and it changed everything. On film, adaptations have differed wildly in tone and approach, from the early classic James Whale films starring Boris Karloff, to the Hammer horror films of the 1950s and 60s with Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, Mel Brooks’s campy comedy Young Frankenstein, and director Kenneth Branagh’s Gothic take from 1994. This new version, by the Oscar-winning Mexican director Guillermo del Toro, may be the best of them all. Read more…
BUGONIA – Jerskin Fendrix
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The term ‘bugonia’ comes from Latin and Greek, and relates to an ancient concept or myth describing the spontaneous generation of bees from the carcass of a dead ox. Philosophically and symbolically, bugonia reflects beliefs in the idea that living creatures can arise from non-living matter, as well as themes of death, rebirth, and transformation. In literary and religious contexts, it often serves as a metaphor for resurrection, drawing parallels between natural cycles and human or divine renewal. All this explains perfectly many of the underlying themes of director Yorgos Lanthimos’s new film, Bugonia. The film stars Jesse Plemons as disaffected conspiracy theorist Teddy Gatz, who has persuaded his autistic cousin Don (newcomer Aidan Delbis) to help him kidnap Michelle Fuller (Emma Stone), the wealthy and powerful CEO of a pharmaceutical megacorporation. Teddy has convinced himself that Michelle is secretly an alien from Andromeda who wants to destroy Earth, and he is determined to make her admit her true identity, and then take him to meet her ‘emperor’ so that he can initiate peace talks with them. Read more…
SINNERS – Ludwig Göransson
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There’s a moment in Sinners, director Ryan Coogler’s outstanding new horror-drama, where the lead characters in the ‘juke joint’ are listening to live blues music, rich and authentic. As the crowd becomes entranced by the performances, overcome by the songs, something magical happens: slowly, almost imperceptibly, avatars representing the entire history of black American music emerge from within the massed dancers, ghosts of the past and foreshadowings of the future of what this music would eventually become over the span of multiple subsequent generations. There are tribal drummers and Zaouli dancers from Côte d’Ivoire, who brought their music and their traditions with them when they were forcibly removed from Africa as slaves, and which eventually became the work songs and ‘Negro spirituals’ of the plantations and the cotton fields. There is 1940s jazz, and 1950s rock and roll. There are 1980s breakdancers, 1990s DJs and rappers, and references to contemporary hip-hop and R&B. It’s a brilliant distillation of one of the major things that Coogler is trying to say with his film – that African music and Black music is at the core of so much of modern American culture, and that that history remains very much overlooked and under-appreciated by too much of the mainstream. Read more…
EMILIA PÉREZ – Clément Ducol, Camille Dalmais
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
One of the most acclaimed films of 2024, and the recipient of 13 Oscar nominations, is Emilia Pérez. Directed by the French auteur Jacques Audiard and filmed almost entirely in Spanish, it is a genre-bending mix of ideas: it explores themes involving Mexican drug cartels, political corruption, and transgender issues; it is about redemption and forgiveness; tonally, it veers from heavy drama to absurd comedy, and even includes some action sequences; and, most importantly from the point of view of this review, it is also a fully sung musical containing almost twenty originals songs, each performed by different members of the cast. Read more…
THE BRUTALIST – Daniel Blumberg
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
There’s a famous quote – which no-one seems to want to take credit for – which states that ‘writing about music is like dancing about architecture’. It basically means that it’s impossible, and probably futile, to try to encapsulate in words what is, at its core, an entirely subjective response to art. As I have spent almost 30 years writing about music I disagree with this sentiment, and that is even more true when it comes to this review of The Brutalist, in which I will attempt to write about the music for a film which is in part about architecture, among many other things. Read more…
WICKED, PART ONE – John Powell, Stephen Schwartz
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
I don’t think a stage musical had captured the attention of mainstream American society the way that Wicked did since the heyday of Andrew Lloyd Webber in the 1980s. It’s interesting how over the last thirty years or so, for the most part, Broadway and West End shows have started to slide out of popular culture and into a niche. It used to be that a new work by Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Stephen Sondheim, or indeed Lloyd Webber, would be big news. The showstopping main number would probably top the charts, and the music would quickly become part of public consciousness and the cultural lexicon. However, and with the obvious exception of Hamilton, the last time this really happened was when Wicked premiered on Broadway in 2004. It was a bonafide smash, making stars out of its two leads Kristin Chenoweth and Idina Menzel, and thrusting composer Stephen Schwartz back into the spotlight in a way he hadn’t been since his successes with Godspell and Pippin in the early 1970s. And now, twenty years after its stage premiere, Wicked has finally been turned into a movie. Read more…
THE WILD ROBOT – Kris Bowers
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
The Wild Robot is a new animated science fiction adventure film, based on the 2016 children’s novel of the same name by Peter Brown, and directed by Chris Sanders, one of the co-directors of How to Train Your Dragon. The story follows the life of Roz, a highly sophisticated service robot who is shipwrecked on an uninhabited island and who must quickly adapt to her surroundings. Over time she builds relationships with the local wildlife, including befriending a fox named Fink, and becoming the adoptive mother of an orphaned goose named Brightbill; however, she soon finds that her new idyllic life as a ‘wild robot’ is under threat from the company that built her. The film has an enormously impressive voice cast led by Lupita Nyong’o as Roz, Pedro Pascal as Fink, and Kit Connor as Brightbill, plus Bill Nighy, Stephanie Hsu, Mark Hamill, Catherine O’Hara, Matt Berry, and Ving Rhames. The film is a beautifully drawn, artistically rendered, funny, moving exploration of numerous concepts related to environmentalism and nature, consumerism, motherhood, adaptability and building relationships, and it has been an enormous box office success, grossing more than $270 million, and sequels based on Brown’s other Roz novels are already in the works. Read more…
CONCLAVE – Volker Bertelmann
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
Conclave is the latest film from German director Edward Berger, whose last film All Quiet on the Western Front won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film, and was nominated for Best Picture, in 2022. It is based on the 2016 novel of the same name by Robert Harris and stars Ralph Fiennes, Stanley Tucci, John Lithgow, Sergio Castellitto, and Isabella Rossellini. Fiennes plays Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, an English catholic priest who is called into action by the Vatican when the Pope dies of a heart attack. Lawrence is charged with organizing and overseeing the papal conclave – a gathering of the Roman Catholic cardinals from around the world which is convened to elect the next pope – but quickly finds himself at the center of a firestorm, investigating allegations and scandals inside the church, while also navigating his own personal crisis of faith. Read more…
AMERICAN FICTION – Laura Karpman
Original Review by Jonathan Broxton
American Fiction is a brilliant satire on literature, race, and family dynamics in contemporary society. Written and directed by Cord Jefferson, who is making his directorial debut here, and based on the 2001 novel ‘Erasure’ by Percival Everett, the film stars Jeffrey Wright as African-American author and English professor Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. Monk is having quite a few problems; his novels receive academic praise, but sell poorly, and publishers reject his most recent manuscript for not being “black enough”. His mother is developing Alzheimer’s disease, his extended family is highly dysfunctional, and he is increasingly annoyed by a fellow writer whose recent bestselling novel apparently panders to ‘ghetto’ black stereotypes but is feted by white literary critics. Frustrated, and needing to raise money for his mother’s medical bills, Monk swallows his pride, adopts the pseudonym ‘Stagg R. Leigh,’ and intentionally writes what he considers a ‘bad novel’ called My Pafology, which also panders to the same black/urban stereotypes of gang violence, drugs, and estranged families. To his increasing shock and exasperation, My Pafology becomes enormously popular and critically acclaimed, and Monk is forced to adopt the ‘gangbanger’ persona of Leigh to maintain the ruse, while also trying to juggle his personal and family issues. Read more…
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS – Victor Young
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Following the enormous success of the first animated film, Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937, Paramount Studios decided to cash in with its own film. It decided to base the new film on Part One of Jonathan Swift’s classic 1726 novel “Gulliver’s Travels”. In a joint venture, Paramount and Fleisher Studios placed Max Fleisher in charge of production with a $700,000 budget, his brother Dave Fleisher would direct, and the team of Dan Gordon, Cal Howard, Ted Pierce, Edmond Seward and Isadore Sparber would write the screenplay. The voice cast would include Sam Parker as Gulliver, Pinto Colvig as Gabby and Snitch, Jack Mercer as Prince David, King Little, Twinkletoes, Snoop, Horses and the Royal Chef, and Ted Pierce as King Bombo and Sneak. Read more…
THE RAINS CAME – Alfred Newman
GREATEST SCORES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Original Review by Craig Lysy
Darryl F. Zanuck 20th Century Fox Studios vice-president of production came upon the 1937 novel The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield and decided its story of redemption set in India would translate well to the big screen. He purchased the film rights, assumed oversight of production with a budget of $2.5 million, tasked Clarence Brown with directing, and hired Philip Dunne and Julien Josephson to write the screenplay. For his cast, Myrna Loy would star as Lady Edwina Esketh, with Tyronne Power as Major Rama Safti, George Brent as Tom Ransome, Brenda Joyce as Fern Simon, Nigel Bruce as Lord Albert Esketh and Maria Ouspenskaya as Maharani. Read more…
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