Forgotten Movie Songs #19: "The sun whose rays" from TOPSY-TURVY

This is, of course, not a song that was written for the movies, though it IS one of the cinema's most moving songs. Originally, it is the premier piece set smack dab in the middle of British librettist William S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan's magnum opus The Mikado, which opened in London in 1885 to astounding applause and then became the team's signature work. Mike Leigh's majestic,

NYFF Review #6: Another Year

I'm convinced. Actually, I've long been convinced. There is not a better filmmaker walking the earth right now than Mike Leigh.

Why else do movies, or any other art form, exist but to make the viewer feel something? So if you want to see movies that make you emote joy or discomfort or anger followed by joy again, then see a Mike Leigh movie. I defy any attentive person to witness Life is

Film #93: Vera Drake

I’ve been a fan of the UK’s Mike Leigh ever since he delivered an incisive look at a working class love affair with High Hopes, back in the late 1980s. (I would consider that film his US breakthrough, even though he’d been making films in Britain since 1971’s Bleak Moments.) His is a unique voice on the world film scene, since he has almost exclusively focused his camera on Britain’s

Side Orders #2

Here we go with more clips, previews and other fun stuff: I think, from now on, I'll start these Side Orders posts of with an opening from a movie I like. Now, when most people cite great credits sequences, they're usually in that Saul Bass/Kyle Cooper mode of thinking--animated graphics and the like. But what about the ones where the graphics aren't the whole magilla? Case in point: the