Saul Bass limited edition exhibition poster
Back in 2004, London's Design Museum held an exhibition of the work of Saul Bass, producing a superbly stylish poster to go along with it. If you missed it, here's some good news - a limited edition re-print is now available.
Saul Bass was the master of film title design thanks to his collaborations with Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese. This poster was inspired by Bass’ titles for Otto Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder and is sized at 1000 x 700mm and printed on parilux matt white 150 gsm paper.
Just £15 buys you one - but don't hang about, once the new stock has sold through, no more will be printed.
Find out more at the Design Museum Store website
"Viva Bossa-sa-sa! Viva Bossa-sa-sa-sa!" When Caetano Veloso yells that, you know he's on to sumthin' cool. Even at it's most third-rate and cruddy, Bossa Nova is still a million times cooler than just about anything else. As a kid, one of my most cherished LPs was this crappy MFP release called 'The Beatles, Bacharach and Bach Go Bossa'. It was barrel scraping Bossa with sleeve notes that said "if your party is sagging in the middle, then play this album!" It was awful. It was exploitative. I loved it.
We love a British cult classic, so we'll be in front of the box all weekend to catch BBC4's British B Movies weekend.
Released in the same year, these two minor gems from Japanese cinema grandee Kenji Mizoguchi are slow but graceful dramas which, though differing greatly in subject matter, share the auteur’s characteristic precision, high production values and humanist yen for emotion defying societal repression.
Not before or since the 1957 release of Ingmar Bergman's haunting masterpiece The Seventh Seal has the momentous theme of humankind's search for existential meaning – within or outside a religious framework – been treated of with such furious grace, intelligence and insight. All cynicism concerning the re-release of a '50th Anniversary Digitally Remastered Edition,' in the year of the great filmmaker's death, must therefore be put on hold. Any reason to publicise or disseminate or roll back the technical decay of this supreme piece of cinematic art, whether or not the companies in question make some extra baksheesh by finagling historical contingency, is a good reason.
Another Vintage Film Poster auction at Christies, with the usual mix of weird and wonderful movie artwork.
We very much enjoyed 
As a film 
Forget those sleep-inducing, Sunday afternoon westerns, The Flipside are hosting something a little more way out in October at London's BFI - How The West Was Weird.
It seems like you can’t turn on the idiot box these days without coming across the newest reality show star turn. Thirteen weeks of Big Brother and the great British public vote for a winner who thinks Shakespeare directed Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo & Juliet simply because he was the nicest of a particularly motley crew.
is available on NTSC Region-1 DVD from Amazon. View the original movie trailer for The Cry Baby Killer below and enjoy the terrific theme song:
This week 20th Century Fox will be unleashing their all new NTSC Region-1 
which will include The Fly (1958), The Return of the Fly (1959) and The Curse of the Fly (1965). This terrific 4 disc DVD set features all new transfers of each of these classic science fiction thrillers and the films are presented in their original widescreen aspect ratios. This is also the first time that The Curse of the Fly has been made available on DVD in the U.S. 
Diana Dors is something of an icon of British popular culture. Her heyday was in the 50s as the glamorous movie star (check out the excellent Yield To The Night), with a career that continued, albeit steadily in decline, until her death in 1984. She even made it onto the cover of The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's album.
Some boxsets are easy to compile - Rocky, Indiana Jones, Star Wars - they compile themselves. But gathering together a Dirk Bogarde box is something very different. This is a man who has appeared in over 60 movies - and with very different profiles, from young tearaway to teen idol, then taking on more serious roles before moving into European arthouse flicks.
Not an unobstructed float up to the firmament, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s. Now regarded as among France’s top cinematic brass, he was once banned from filmmaking for two years due to his involvement with the infamous Continental Film Company. This was a subtle propaganda gambit from Vichy France’s Nazi administration, established at Goebbels’ request, to give the occupied citizens some audiovisual pabulum in the absence of Hollywood’s offerings, which were banned.
Good news if you're in the UK - BBC2 is doing what it should always do - promoting the best of British movies, this time under the title of The Summer Of British Film.
When a film is made specifically for the Festival Of Britain, you would expect it to look good and be star-packed. That's definitely the case with John Boulting's The Magic Box - but whether it's a great film is a different matter.
I'm not sure about the legality of 
I caught my first glimpse of Jean-Paul Belmondo in a French lesson in the 70s-think it was some book on French culture we were poring over and there it was, a picture of two figures in natty 1920’s threads and cocked hats, back to back, arms folded staring icily at the camera. Effortlessly out-staring the viewer they appeared to be in some competition with each other - a kind of duel of cool. Neither of them smiled but the older looking one had a warm humour in his eyes and the similarities and contrasts between these two handsome gents, instantly reminded me of my Hollywood heroes, Steve McQueen and Paul Newman. The film was called Borsalino and the sharp looking cats were Alain Delon and Jean-Paul Belmondo.
Warner Home Video is releasing a huge batch of campy cult classics on NTSC Region-1 DVD next week that are sure to entertain B-movie fans. The films are available in four different collections and each collection contains 3 different movies.
: Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman (1958), Giant Behemoth (1958), Queen of Outer Space (1958).
: The Big Cube (1968), Caged (1950), Trog (1969).
: Hot Rods to Hell (1966), Skyjacked (1972), Zero Hour! (1957)
: The Colossus of Rhodes (1961), Land of the Pharaohs (1955), The Prodigal (1955)
Last summer VCI Entertainment released their impressive 
, that brought together six crime thrillers from the early fifties made by “The Studio That Dripped Blood.” Next week VCI Entertainment is releasing the second volume of their ongoing series, 
, which contains eight more Hammer films that are sure to please fans of classic noir.
Mad, Mod & Macabre: The Ronald Stein Collection is an impressive new 5-Disc CD collection from Los Angeles-based Percepto Records that features the fabulous film scores of American composer Ronald Stein.
London's Barbican is doing its bit for cross-Channel friendship, offering three seasons of classic French cinema under the title Aspects of French Cinema.
The premise of Nicolas Roeg’s oddity Insignificance is improbable and instantly compelling: over the course of a muggy night in New York City in 1953 a famous actress, baseball player, physics professor and senator interact with varying degrees of civility. It is clear to anyone familiar with post-war American culture that these are Marilyn Monroe, Joe DiMaggio, Albert Einstein and communist-rooter-outer Joe McCarthy respectively, though their names are never mentioned. Like author Don DeLillo, Roeg here attempts to digest an era using a sample of its most celebrated sons and daughters.
H.G. Wells wrote The Invisible Man novel back in 1897, but to many, it's probably best-known for its 1930s film adaptations and later TV incarnations, the most famous of which is this 1958 TV series.