Simon's Movie Reviews

12 Angry Men (1957) is another example of how you can make one hell of a movie with a small cast, an enclosed space and a director who knows how to work his cameras. Jury duty is something most people try to avoid, but as directed by Sydney Lumet it becomes a fascinating morality tale as twelve strangers debate the life of a young man accused of murder. Almost entirely shot within one room and with a brisk 96-minute running time it is a timeless classic. My first viewing was on a DVD rental, so obviously this was a couple of years before Netflix. The DVD extras are definitely worth it for a retrospective on the cast of twelve actors, the film’s legacy, and the opinion of legal scholars. Like all movies it has its flaws, and apparently the most glaring was the judge’s blasé attitude given the fact this is a murder trial. That flaw aside, this is definitely a movie worth seeing with someone else because unlike many movies that come out today it makes you think while you are it and a...

The average moviegoer will know Peter Sellers solely for his work in The Pink Panther franchise, but devout film fans will know one of his best performances was in Hal Ashby’s Being There (1979). Sellers was a performer who could easily inhabit colourful characters, whether that was the bumbling inspector Clouseau or the deranged Dr. Strangelove, but the character of Chance the gardener in Ashby’s film is a person who almost has no personality to speak of. Yet Sellers’ performance and the situations in which the character is plunged ended up making Being There a memorable send off, as it was Sellers’ last film. The reason I know it was his last film is because I learned it from watching his biopic The Life and Death of Peter Sellers in which he his portrayed by Geoffrey Rush. In that movie, whether it is 100 per cent accurate or not, Sellers pursues the role of Chance in Being There with great enthusiasm because he saw it as chance to prove he could play something other than a...