Movie Reviews by Penelope Houston - Page 4 of 7

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Review of Z (1969)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

There is a snapping-up of glib trifles which somewhat undercuts the gravity of Z's overt pretensions…

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Review of Waterloo (1970)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

A confusion of spectacular aerial shots, romantic slow- motion calvary charges, mumbled high command conferences and deafening artillery…

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Review of You're a Big Boy Now (1966)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

You're a Big Boy Now slides up and down the escalators of charm, wayward fancy, stabs at taking itself seriously, and exuberantly crisp and…

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Review of Getting Straight (1970)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

A comedy so confused about having its campus cake and eating it that it emerges with some sticky mouthfuls liberally smeared over its face…

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Review of Castle Keep (1969)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

As though a marriage had been arranged between Catch 22 and A Long Day's Dying, and neither party felt much confidence in the outcome…

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Review of The Assassination Bureau (1969)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

The Assassination Bureau is a mild, amiable entertainment, arousing at most a mild literary curiosity…

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Review of Grand Prix (1966)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

Frankenheimer can make one feel that there's no more exhilarating place to put a camera than on a Formula One…

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Review of Stolen Kisses (1968)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

The film wears its charm on its sleeve, which is probably as good a place as any to wear it: tender, hilarious, gracefully reticent…

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Review of Anne of the Thousand Days (1969)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

It's all court flummery, simplified Tudor connivings, Anthony Quayle looking like a querulous crayfish…

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Review of There Was a Crooked Man... (1970)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

If smart callousness, moral indifference and violence on the rockpile are what you are looking for, at least this ex- ample is rather conspicuously…

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Review of Satyricon (1969)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

Satyricon achieves a curious dual effect…

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Review of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

Part of the pleasure one derives from 2001 is watching it coolly chip away at a lot of restrictive assumptions about how you construct a spectacular…

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Review of Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

Even the air-raid, one of those all- out bits of Hollywood destruction staging which offer plenty of time for sour speculation on the sheer…

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Review of Medium Cool (1969)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

This brilliantly uneasy film has a sharp enough sense of its own paradoxes to shake off as naive the very questions it raises…

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Review of The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction (1967)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

The centre fails to hold, and increasingly the emotive devices of the production seem to be lashing around in an intellectual straitjacket…

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Review of Alfred the Great (1969)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

There's a dejected feeling about this whole cinematic folly, as though somewhere along the way it had lost confidence even in its own anachronisms…

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Review of Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 08 Jul 2018

There's a feeling, thanks to the director's consciously oblique angle of vision, both of turning over fading newspaper files for over-romantic…

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Review of Shane (1953)

By Penelope Houston (126) for Sight and Sound (827) on 05 Jul 2018

The simple story, the legendary hero: this is the Western tradition…

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Review of John and Mary (1969)

By Penelope Houston (126) for The Spectator (1,162) on 05 Jul 2018

Although John Mortimer's script takes a slightly lazy path, mixing up trendy fantasy and trendy fact as though it's no longer worth the trouble…

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Review of The Sacrifice (1986)

By Penelope Houston (126) for Sight and Sound (827) on 05 Jul 2018

There are echoes of Bergman (of course) and of Chekhov, and once or twice I found myself thinking, most unexpectedly, of Heartbreak House…

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