Jonathan Crocker

Before slashing on The Joker’s rictus grin, Heath Ledger returned to Oz for this toxic love story. He’s a poet. His blonde angel Candy (Abbie Cornish) is a painter. But really they’re both just young, boho junkies on a quivering tailspin through sunshine passion, cold turkey and the fresh, harried nowhere of addiction.

Drug-drama cliché roadblocks any new revelations here, but Candy does find a niche away from Requiem For A Dream’s hyperbole and Trainspotting’s swagger. Underplayed and acted to the max, it engrosses through heartbreaking moments (horrific still-birth, domestic meltdown) and keen observations (“For every 10 years you’ve been a junkie, you’ll have spent seven of them waiting”). Read the rest of this entry »

Birthed in the genius/mentalist brainpan of virtuoso artist Donald Cammell, Performance was pitched to Warner Bros as the smash-hit cocktail of cinema’s two hottest genres: pop-star vehicle and Swinging London flick. With Rolling Stones demi-god Mick Jagger co-directed by brilliant cinematographer Nicolas Roeg and libertine intellectual Cammell, this would be the first Swinging London flick by swinging Londoners. When one exec’s wife began vomiting at Performance’s test-screening, one thing became clear: A Hard Day’s Night, this was not. Read the rest of this entry »

Seven years in the making, $15 million budget, 10,0000 costumes, 8,000 extras, 300 sets, 222 minutes runtime, $80 worldwide gross, 11 Oscars… Ben-Hur’s staggering stat-attack bulges further with this monolithic Collector’s Edition: four discs and 10 hours of bonus material. Fitting treatment for a widescreen mega-epic that saved MGM’s lion from the wolves, rescued cinema from the tube and finally convinced Charlton Heston that he was indeed bigger than Jesus. Read the rest of this entry »

In showbiz, they say you’ve only achieved true fame when you’re known simply by your first name. By 1955, Marilyn Monroe was so famous her screen character no longer needed a name at all. In Billy Wilder’s midsummer-night’s sex comedy, she is simply The Girl – a ditzy, curvaceous bombshell who lives upstairs from neurotic publishing-house everyman Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell). Read the rest of this entry »