Simon's Movie Reviews

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...

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946) has many of the master director’s signature elements: spies, lies, a handsome leading man, a domineering mother, and of course a MacGuffin. As it is set after World War II the villains are logically former Nazis, but the plot is so tense in many scenes that it remains an effective thriller to this day. It also bears a huge influence on John Woo’s Mission Impossible 2 , which retains plot elements and similar dialogue, but of course has more explosions than all of Hitchcock’s films put together. Notorious is so well-made it can be studies in film classes, which is exactly what I did while taking a course on Hollywood Cinema 1930-1960 during the summer of 2009 at the University of British Columbia. As this is Hitchcock we are talking about here, there are subtler things to analyze than explosions in Notorious , no offense to the skills of Mr. John Woo. Famously there is a kissing scene between stars Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman that seemingly las...