Film Review: Hitchcock (2012)

Alfred Hitchcock has the unique distinction of being the only film-maker in history who can be readily identified by nothing more than his silhouette. Through his television interviews and the dry, morbidly funny introductions he performed at the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, he became not just a director of iconic films, but an icon himself. Yet despite, or perhaps because of, his well-crafted public persona, there is still something fascinatingly unknowable about the man, the obsessive son of a grocer who (allegedly) did everything short of torture his actresses in pursuit of realising the images in his head. There's certainly potential for a great psycho-drama about Hitchcock, or at the very least an interesting one about whether or not the themes that underpin his work - paranoia, voyeurism, a fear of authority - bled into his private life.

Film Review: You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010)

Let history show that this was officially the point at which Woody Allen just stopped trying.

Woody Allen has directed at least one film a year since 1982, and his decision to keep up that work rate well into his 70s is, on one level, incredibly admirable. However, whenever he produces a film as lazy, ill-conceived and tired as You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, it's hard not to think that, much like Alfie Shebritch (Anthony Hopkins), he might be better off accepting that he isn't as young as he used to be and that adopting a more sedate pace, or at least taking an extra few months to come up with an ending to his script, might be a better idea.