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Feature Screengem

Screengem: Harmonica’s Harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968)

Spaghetti Western master Sergio Leone, and his maestro, Ennio Morricone, would employ individual, idiosyncratic musical motifs – quirky themes, linked or not to the movie’s main theme, sometimes little more than recurring sound effects, often played on particular or significant instruments ­– to help announce a character’s entrance, accompany or comment on his activities and […]

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Lost Classic Reviews

Lost Classic: Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River

Taylor Sheridan’s Wind River (2017) pitches us into an unforgiving wintry environment and declares once and for all, as if we didn’t know already, that this writer-director will be a survivor. And yes, his movie grips and informs and entertains along the way. A female, big-city-loneliness FBI agent finds herself tracking a rapist and murderer, his […]

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Feature Four Frames

Four Frames: John Wayne (1907 to 1979)

Mark Cousins, Northern Ireland’s acclaimed documentary filmmaker, said one of the things that first helped him realise there was more to the movies was “when my father cried at a John Wayne picture”. Yeah, Mark – we’ve all been there. The British critic David Thomson was an excoriator of Wayne – the man and his […]