D. J. M. Saunders is a practising artist who lives and works in Cardiff, Wales. 
Drama · Religion & Spirituality · War
Overt spirituality is often undermined in this film by bizarrely comic episodes from everyday life. Certainly the most bizarre plot element concerns the Glue Man – someone who attacks young[…]
But goes on being itself * * * True Love in cinema is more than fine acting, well-written scripts, or even directorial tone. Not that IMDb cast and crew should[…]
Drama · Essays · Uncategorized
Isn’t something less reassuring and a lot more interesting going on – something more inclusive, diverse, and genuinely universal? * * * There are still too many human beings on[…]
The women in these feminist films have power, but they’re more complex than fatale. * * * In the ultra-buoyant realms of badass, the femme fatale is equal to any[…]
O wad some Power the giftie gie us, to see oursels as ithers see us! – Robert Burns, “To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet At Church.” * *[…]
Our cinematic genome, meanwhile, is becoming – if not always more clearly defined – certainly more rich and diverse and, at the same time, more universal than ever. * *[…]
Dreams and Pistol Shots * * * From Leslie Halliwell to David Thomson, capsule reviews of Hitchcock’s Spellbound have made sure we know that the psychiatry on offer is pure[…]
What I find in Wim Wenders I find in William Blake (and all interesting artists): a desire for a better world that does not underestimate the difficulties of achieving it[…]
Regular or otherwise, interesting films famously have the power to take us inside other people’s heads. * * * In the 2014 film Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter, director/co-writer David Zellner[…]
It’s more than magic * * * With Rachel Weisz as a fourth-century intellectual surrounded by far from intellectually questing males, Agora was Spain’s most commercially successful film of 2009.[…]
Drama · Essays · Writers & Critics
Lincoln (2012) & Wolf Hall (2015)/Les Miserables (1933) & Great Expectations (1946/2012) * * * So, notwithstanding humanist art or realistic biography, we go on hurting each other. “Everybody hurts,” as[…]
Suddenly the whole medium grew up before my eyes . . . a grown-up film, with people behaving as they do in real life . . . . Nobody had ever[…]
To be clear, The Holly and the Ivy is not mistakable for a lost gem from Renoir or Mizoguchi. Yet it does make the most of a story told “in[…]
When space seems polluted with far too many Superbeings, maybe cinema is not the first place to go for relief. Yet for those who have not given up looking for[…]
“While I get Sam Goldwyn’s point about messages and Western Union, I think Shakespeare is always sending the same one: to overcome our worst weaknesses, first we must see them[…]
“Everything goes on in the mind of a man who, nominally at least, has absolute power at court and who, until a few moments before, felt secure in the mutual[…]
Where all this takes me is to the thought that fiction frequently presents human personality as something lost or imprisoned – by self-ignorance and suspicion if by nothing worse. “We’re[…]
Drama is about extremity. This can centre on one person, or on his/her society or both. Without it drama cannot exist. But what if the world’s greatest dramatist starts testing[…]
“I now present Anthony Quinn (1915-2001) – the mighty one himself – in a light few will recognize: not Quinn the rank sentimentalist ham (or Eskimo), but Quinn the deeply[…]
By means of horror?
