Simon's Movie Reviews

War by its very definition is a chaotic situation, whereas a prison is a place where chaos is something to be controlled or avoided. Having these two worlds collide raises a lot of moral questions, such as do prison rules still apply when war is raging outside the walls? David Lean’s classic The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) explores these questions and other complex ones on a grand scale while being highly entertaining. It is the sort of epic you rarely see now and that must have been quite something to behold on the big screen. Like the rest of the planet I can’t go out to see anything on the big screen right now, unless I can find a drive-through theater in the area. However, there are plenty of apps that give me access to free movies with commercial breaks, including Lean’s epic. With a running time of 161 minutes it consumes a big chunk of your afternoon, but I was never bored. With all the time we are spending indoors nowadays, why not spend some of those hours watchi...

Lawrence of Arabia (1962), directed by the much-lauded David Lean, is an old-school cinema epic in every sense of the word. It features magnificent wide shots of the sprawling desert, thousands of extras simulating the carnage of war, and a cast of stellar actors all at the top of their games. This is also the first big-screen role for the legendary Peter O’Toole, who commands the screen throughout and got his first of eight Academy Award nominations for the role. Not bad for a young man who, so I’ve read, drank a bottle of champagne every night during the shoot. To everyone who was worried about sitting through Avengers: Endgame earlier this year because it has a running time of 181 minutes, I challenge you to watch the restored version of Lawrence of Arabia currently available on Netflix. Running time: 220 minutes. To be fair, part of that running time includes an overture and an intermission, but we are still talking about over three hours of story here. Both Avengers and...