The first feature film based on Arthur Conan Doyle’s great detective presents the only screen performance by William Gillette, the first actor to play Holmes on the stage, and influenced the way Holmes has been played onscreen.
Category: Fandor
Nina Hoss is ‘Barbara’ on Fandor and Kanopy
Barbara (2012), directed by Christian Petzold, stars Nina Hoss as a doctor from East Berlin who has been banished to a nowhere village in rural East Germany for carrying on an affair with a man from West Germany. You have to piece together the time and place from the details (this is before The Wall […]
Halloween Picks: The best of Mario Bava on Amazon Prime and Fandor
Mario Bava essentially created the genre of baroque horror known as “giallo,” a distinctly Italian twist on stalk and kill horror film. Under his direction, Grand Guignol gore is transformed into lush, visually elegant cinematic spectacle, a waking nightmare with the poetic grace of a musical and a demented edge of sexual perversity. After rising […]
‘Last Life in the Universe’ on Fandor
In the enigmatic, hypnotic Last Life in the Universe (2004) from Thailand, Asano Tadanobu is a meek Japanese librarian in Bangkok who has fastidiously transformed his apartment into an oasis of calm and order. He plans to complete the transformation with his suicide, but fate (or merely conflicted self-preservation) keeps him alive when he kills […]
Orson Welles’s ‘Othello’ on Shout! Factory TV and Fandor
Orson Welles’ 1952 masterpiece Othello, his shoestring-budgeted adaptation of the Shakespeare tragedy, is an example of creative will overcoming physical liability. Using primitive (by Hollywood standards) equipment and a rotating crew, and interrupting his shoot to raise money, Welles shot in spurts over three years all over Italy and Morocco and matched images shot in […]