John McDonald

Earlier this year I watched an old Hammer Horror called The Plague of the Zombies. As an alternative title for Josh Boone’s debut feature, A Place for Me, I’d respectfully suggest: The Plague of the Writers. It is a scenario worthy of any horror flick to find a family in which everyone – and their … More

Although I’m not much interested in the celebrity circuit, it was surprising to read, late last year, that Bradley Cooper had been named The Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. By all accounts the most outraged constituency were fans of Ryan Gosling, the other Hollywood pin-up boy of our era. If it achieves nothing else, … More

Mohsin Hamid says the structure of his novel of 2007, The Reluctant Fundamentalist, was partly based on Fred Zinnemann’s classic western, High Noon. Instead of Gary Cooper waiting for the baddies to arrive, we have a group of militant students in Lahore awaiting the police and a group of American agents. It sounds good in … More

Having done the stats on the French film industry earlier this year, the annual Audi Festival of German Films tempts me to take a quick look at Europe’s other great cinematic powerhouse. While the French clocked up 272 features in 2011, the Germans managed a respectable 212. This makes it the seventh biggest film producer … More

‘Switched at birth’ was a favourite plot device for Gilbert and Sullivan. It resolved a lot of tricky dilemmas and allowed true love to overcome barriers of class and kinship. By now the theme might seem as corny as a Victorian operetta, but a good device can always be relied upon for new twist. The … More

In old episodes of Get Smart, it was not uncommon for Secret Agent 86 to wish that some villain had used his powers “for niceness instead of evil”. No is the movie that applies this wishful thought to the advertising industry. It is 1988, in Chile. The military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet has been … More

William Eggleston, whose work is showing at Sydney’s Museum of Contemporary Art, is known for introducing colour into contemporary art photography. It was not a popular innovation among his peers who were devoted to the medium of black-and-white. The unspoken wisdom is that the world seems far more profound when photographed in black-and-white, and irredeemably … More

In a recent poll sponsored by HMV, Danny Boyle’s Trainspotting (1996) was voted the best British film of the past 60 years. Although such surveys have an unhappy resemblance to those ‘Greatest Hits of All Time’ polls run by commercial radio stations, Trainspotting deserves the kudos. It was a brilliantly original movie which sealed Boyle’s … More

Hard on the heels of Lincoln comes another movie about a great American President. But if Steven Spielberg seemed to be sending a message to Barack Obama about being steadfast and determined, it’s hard to know what Richard Michell is telling us about Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Hyde Park on Hudson. Allowing for its Spielbergisms, … More

Takashi Miike is the cinema’s man of a thousand faces. He is astonishingly prolific for a contemporary filmmaker, having directed more than 60 movies since his debut in 1991, as well as stage and TV productions. Miike is notorious not only for the quantity of his films but for their bewildering variety. He is probably … More