With its blend of wistful nostalgia for and biting satire of bygone English nobility, Evelyn Waugh’s magnum opus Brideshead Revisited is among the most celebrated English novels — more despite than because of its preoccupation with Catholicism, for which it ranks also among the most celebrated Catholic novels.
Note: The two reviews below were inadvertently dropped from Decent Films several years ago.
A compelling thriller, a smoldering love story, a thoughtful study in comparative cultures, and a respectful exploration of religious community and nonviolence, Witness is one of the high points of 1980s American cinema, and remains one of Australian director Peter Weir’s best films as well as his first American film.
How do you weigh the cultural heritage of a nation against the value of human life? That’s the subtext of The Train, a wholly persuasive, intelligent thiller crisply directed by John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) with documentary-like realism and emphasis on action and problem-solving.
What exactly is
The Wicker Man, with its sunny, cheerfully unsettling sense of rising dread, its placid, fitfully erotic folk soundtrack, and its off-putting, tragic protagonist?
What do you get if you take Robin Hardy’s cult classic The Wicker Man, and then take out religion and sex? And folk music?