2018-04-09 21:36
You know, they just do not make B movies like they used to. Take Plan 9 from Outer Space, for instance. This strange mix between science fiction and zombie film, with just a wee touch of vam… Read More
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A blog about movies found at the Internet Archive (archive.org)
2018-04-03 09:00
It is only very rarely that some reader of this blog tips me off about a film that I should review on this site. When it does happen, however, it is always very welcome, and this week’… Read More
2018-03-26 21:39
The evil crime genius Dr. Mabuse has been locked up in an asylum for years. And yet, there are rumours that his band of criminals is again operative, and they commit crimes that seem strange… Read More
2018-03-19 20:36
From an international perspective, the 1950s in Swedish film is known for two things only: Sex and Ingmar Bergman. The Swedish classic Hon dansade en sommar (One Summer of Happiness) gives u… Read More
2018-03-12 22:17
I have long since lost count of the number of great films I would never have seen if it was not for the Internet Archive. Yet another in the long line is Tol’able David, a coming of ag… Read More
2018-03-05 21:14
As the 1940s turned into the 1950s, things happened with the film noir genre. It has something to do with the lighting, and with the camera angles. Perhaps there is something aobut the plots… Read More
2018-02-26 22:59
Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame is one of those literary classics that have been filmed on a number of different occasions, infamously including an animated Disney version, p… Read More
2018-02-12 14:23
Life is tough for Frank Bigelow. Not only is he uncertain about his feelings for his girlfriend and secretary Paula, but he is also dying after having been poisoned by a radioactive substanc… Read More
2018-02-05 12:05
The sword-and-sandal, or peplum, genre of films has a long history, starting in the silent era. But for a few short years, the genre was the bright centre of the cinematic universe, at least… Read More
2018-01-29 22:31
When I think about Frank Sinatra, I think about him as a singer. But he also acted in dozens of films, mostly during the 1950s and 1960s, and he was not a half bad actor. Today, his acting i… Read More
2018-01-22 22:29
Through the years, I have not reviewed very many horror films at this blog, and some of those I have written about, quite frankly, are not all that horrible. This week, however, I present on… Read More
2018-01-15 22:09
I have previously written about a number of serials. Looking at those earlier reviews, one might easily get the impression that serials were mostly a sound film phenomenon. Ah, but nothing c… Read More
2018-01-01 18:41
Eight men, one woman. They have formed a secret society, the aim of which is to better mankind by murdering those who deserve to die. They have gathered on this day to decide if a certain pe… Read More
2017-12-25 12:51
I sit here on Christmas Eve, surrounded by family, waiting for Christmas dinner to be prepared and for presents to arrive (where I live, Christmas Eve is more important to celebrate than Chr… Read More
2017-12-19 20:58
The Internet Archive is truly a place for discovery and learning. Like when I wrote about Cabiria last week, and discovered not only that the Italian hero Maciste originated in that film, bu… Read More
2017-12-11 20:37
In the 1910s, for the most part, film as a storytelling medium was not yet very mature. Most films were static in their camerawork, and the scripts were often clumsy. Some slapstick comedy f… Read More
2017-12-04 21:10
I wonder if I would have ever discovered Charles Laughton if it had not been for the Internet Archive (search this blog for “Laughton” and you will find a number of his many grea… Read More
2017-11-27 11:19
An agent for a war crimes commission decides, in desperation, to let a German war criminal out of prison in the hopes that he may lead them to another German who committed atrocious acts aga… Read More
2017-11-20 21:36
It seems to me that there is often something special about films set during the period of king Louis XIII (with Cardinal Richelieu in the head of government). I guess it is the gilt from The… Read More
2017-11-14 20:52
There are several very good film noirs at the Internet Archive. Since I have previously only written about five of them, the latest over a year ago – the “historical noir thrille… Read More
2017-11-06 20:09
Tomorrow, it was exactly one hundred years ago that the Russian October revolution started (Russia was using the Julian calendar at the time; hence the confusion about the specific month). T… Read More
2017-10-30 16:30
H. G. Wells’ groundbreaking 19th Century science fiction novel The War of the Worlds is fascinating, not only in itself, but just as much because of all the adaptations and sequels it… Read More
2017-10-23 20:04
J. R. R. Tolkien spent almost an entire lifetime world-building, constructing languages and writing stories, most of them set in his fictional world Middle-earth. Yet very little of what he… Read More
2017-10-16 20:13
There can be no doubt that Alfred Hitchcock was one of the most influential directors of all time. Many also hold that he was one of the greatest. His true greatness is most obvious in his m… Read More
2017-10-09 20:27
In my review of Ingeborg Holm (1913), I suggested that it is hard to find good feature film older than that, but during the early years of the 1910s, many good films were created that do not… Read More
2017-10-02 21:01
It is interesting how inspiration can sometimes go in circles – or at least in spirals. Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, published in 1894, lent inspiration to Edgar Rice Burro… Read More
2017-09-25 20:53
When I first discovered and read about the German World War II film U-Boote westwärts!, I was struck by the extreme story similarities with the British film We Dive at Dawn from two yea… Read More
2017-09-18 20:26
I have had an almost lifelong fascination for aviation movies. When I was a kid, I dreamt of becoming a pilot, and I guess the best aviation movies sort of made that dream seem true for a br… Read More
2017-09-11 19:49
Before watching the film The Flying Deuces, I had no idea what the word “deuce” meant (except for the tennis term). I have now informed myself, and I know that it means “pa… Read More
2017-09-04 19:21
There is a lot of German film at the Internet Archive. There are German wartime newsreels, silent classics from the German Expressionism and World War II propaganda such as Kampf um Norwegen… Read More
2017-08-28 20:45
If you are interested in any part of U.S. history, then you will probably want to check out the collection FedFlix. It is a huge selection of films produced by the U.S. government, in many d… Read More
2017-08-21 20:20
In Frank Capra’s classic Why We Fight series, where he tried to explain to the American public why it is important to participate in World War II, the turn has now come to The Battle o… Read More
2017-08-14 21:31
As far as I know, the first feature film adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde was the 1920 film I wrote about last week. It was to b… Read More
2017-08-07 21:58
Robert Louis Stevenson’s story The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is arguably one of the most popular, or at least well-known, pieces of literary fiction ever written. The ori… Read More
2017-07-31 13:30
I think I discovered the Internet Archive around 2006, about ten years after it was founded. Though there are many and varied media represented in the archive, I was always drawn to the Movi… Read More
2017-07-24 10:42
It is very common in a movie to see a chess board, or two people playing a game of chess, and sometimes, such as in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) or the Bond film From Russia with… Read More
2017-07-17 09:20
We continue our Short Film Month with a look at an old Disney character. Well, almost. The film is The Merry Old Soul and the character is Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.
Oswald, so the story goes… Read More
2017-07-10 16:09
The second entry in our ongoing Short Film Month is an example of Buster Keaton as a short film actor and producer in his film Cops.
Buster Keaton started producing, directing and writing h… Read More
2017-07-03 07:45
For the second time in the life of this blog, it is time for Short Film Month. The reason why I want to devote an entire month’s output only to short film is that I normally only write… Read More
2017-06-26 13:29
I have loved silent film for nearly forty years, ever since I saw a series of Chaplin films on TV. But it was not until about half a year ago that I watched my first silent with live accompa… Read More
2017-06-19 21:20
One of the first films made by the famous British team of writers/producers/directors Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (jointly known as “The Archers”) was the World War II… Read More
2017-06-12 12:16
If Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt is a film about the city where the people live, then Menschen am Sonntag is a film about the people that live in the city. Just like in the former… Read More
2017-06-05 21:59
To document a single day in a big city, without doing so through the viewpoint of a single protagonist, would perhaps seem like a pretty rotten idea. Yet that is what the film Berlin: Die Si… Read More
2017-05-29 13:46
Alexander Korda was a very solid British director, perhaps best known for his 1940 remake of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924), which is considered to outshine even the spe… Read More
2017-05-22 20:30
Man in the Attic is sometimes referred to as a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent classic The Lodger – A Story of the London Fog (1927). But unlike Ivor Novello’s The Phan… Read More
2017-05-15 14:38
Imagine discovering that you have the power over life and death for certain persons. With a simple action you can decide who dies within the next few hours. Of course, that is not necessaril… Read More
2017-05-08 21:05
Those of you who follow this blog may have (correctly) come to the conclusion that I like silent film. That is not only because many silents have considerable artistic merits, but also becau… Read More
2017-05-01 20:34
Paul Wegener made no less than three silent films about the Jewish legend of the golem, the monster created from clay and animated by magic. Opinions differ as to whether the films form a tr… Read More
2017-04-24 19:10
Last week, I promised that this week would feature a Sherlock Holmes tie-in. Unfortunately, the intended film, Sherlock, Jr. (1924) starring Buster Keaton, turned out to be of much poorer te… Read More
2017-04-17 13:53
Later this week, this blog turns four years. With this week’s post, I therefore take you back to where it all began: Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes in 1946.
That first film I wrote… Read More
2017-04-10 11:52
Madame Beudet is smiling. She is smiling, even laughing, at her own daydreams about what might befall her husband, whom she does not love. He, hearing her laughter, pulls his own favourite p… Read More
2017-04-03 18:28
When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, they immediately banned a number of films that they perceived as spreading “dangerous” propaganda. One of them was Niemandsland… Read More
2017-03-27 20:21
I think it is a fair statement that the modern horror genre was born out of a marriage between the German Expressionism's easthetics and Hollywood’s big-budget, mainstream storytelling… Read More
2017-03-19 11:49
A Diary for Timothy
This film is best enjoyed
A Diary for TimothyDownload link
Year: 1945
Running time: 37 min
Director: Humphrey Jennings
Stars: Michael Redgrave (narrator)
Image quality:… Read More
2017-03-13 20:50
If you have a soft spot for British mystery films, then you will not want to miss The Case of the Frightened Lady. It is a delightful, albeit fairly conventional, mansion mystery, complete w… Read More
2017-03-06 21:08
Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the Soviet Union for only six years before he died. Ten years after his death, the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov made a spectacular propaganda film, celebrat… Read More
2017-02-27 09:34
Sometimes, I find myself watching a film for very strange reasons. X Marks the Spot, for example. I was looking at this blog’s alphabetical list of films, and realized that I had blogg… Read More
2017-02-20 09:56
The submarine film is an interesting genre, and We Dive at Dawn is a good representative. Here you will find everything to be expected from a good submarine film. The closed spaces, the comr… Read More
2017-02-13 06:28
There are quite a few old serials at the Internet Archive. The serial was a common cinematic genre from the 1910s through the 1950s. There were many different subgenres (western being, perha… Read More
2017-02-06 20:34
The documentary is an interesting genre. In a sense, it may be said to be the first film genre. Some of the very earliest surviving films, such as Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge (1888), were… Read More
2017-01-30 21:30
2017 marks the 100th anniversary of the October revolution in Russia, which led to the forming of the Soviet Union and 70 years of communist domination in Eastern Europe. During most of 2017… Read More
2017-01-23 08:17
Frank Capra’s famous World War II propaganda series Why We Fight has been justly praised for its high drama and impact. I have previously written about The Nazis Strike, the second par… Read More
2017-01-16 20:16
Sergei Eisenstein’s first feature-length film, Strike (known as Stachka or Стачка in Russian), showed that the legendary director had already at tha… Read More
2017-01-09 15:37
Back when I was a kid in Sweden in the 1970s, there used to be a famous series of books for kids. (In fact, that series was published for almost 100 years, and there were over 3,000 titles.)… Read More
2017-01-02 10:06
So, here we go again. Another new year begins, along with the usual celebrations. A few close friends; good food and wine; some fireworks. It is at times like these that one should perhaps… Read More
2016-12-26 09:24
One year ago, almost exactly, I wrote about Scrooge (1951), one of the many cinematic interpretations of Charles Dickens’ famous story A Christmas Carol. That version is only one of se… Read More
2016-12-19 10:19
Imagine being kicked in the shin. Repeatedly, over and over again, for almost two hours. That is what it feels like to watch The Star Wars Holiday Special. I normally try to stay away from w… Read More
2016-12-12 22:37
Today, many people argue that the best thing about Hell’s Angels is the dramatic and well produced flight sequences. That may be true, but even though the film would have been pretty m… Read More
2016-12-05 20:30
Between 1922 and 1960, the play The Bat was filmed at least five times. I have previously written about the 1960 TV version, and in that post I also told a bit about how the story is connect… Read More
2016-11-28 21:52
In 1928, just before making his last silent films, Buster Keaton moved from United Artists to MGM, a move that in retrospect ruined his career. In a very short time, he went from making immo… Read More
2016-11-21 21:26
Those who are used to Hitchcock’s Hollywood productions will find a great many surprises among the genres of his earlier films made in England. But although very different from his &ld&hell…Read More
2016-11-14 21:28
I cannot decide whether one should regret or applaud USA’s old copyright law. What it amounted to was that anything that did not have a copyright notice on it was not protected by copy… Read More
2016-11-07 18:03
Legendary directory Cecil B. DeMille made two radically different films titled The Ten Commandments during his long Hollywood career. Featured here is The Ten Commandments from 1923, a spect… Read More
2016-10-31 21:01
The oldest films I have previously reviewed on this site have been from the years 1913 and 1914, and I personally think it is very difficult to go any further back in time than that when you… Read More
2016-10-24 12:39
This Short Film Month of October continues with a more recent film than previous entries. This time we turn our focus onto a very short and at first sight insignificant little animation that… Read More
2016-10-17 15:39
“This is Tony, going to his Cub Scout meeting. Tony knows the Bomb can explode anytime, day or night, any time of year. He’s ready for it. Duck and cover!”
Oh, yeah. Those… Read More
2016-10-10 19:54
October is Short Film Month, and today we celebrate one of the most important short film creators ever, Charlie Chaplin. A good many of his shorts are available at the Internet Archive, and… Read More
2016-10-03 18:06
Normally, I do not do short film on this blog, but because of the rich treasure of classic short films available at the Internet Archive, I have decided that October is Short Film Month. Fir… Read More
2016-09-26 19:55
If you have been reading my posts about Ingeborg Holm (1913), Berg-Ejvind och hans hustru (1918) and Klostret i Sendomir (1920), then you know that I, along with many others, consider Victor… Read More
2016-09-19 19:08
Only a handful of Hollywood actors from the 1930s are as well remembered today as Shirley Temple, the cutesey child actor, adored by everyone. At the ripe age of ten, Temple made the film Th… Read More
2016-09-12 20:04
Last week, I wrote about how Douglas Fairbanks defined the entire pirate film genre with The Black Pirate (1926). Having said as much, all pirate films are naturally not made from the same t… Read More
2016-09-05 20:06
Through the Internet Archive, you can follow Douglas Fairbanks’ career pretty well. From one of his earliest bit parts in The Martyrs of the Alamo (1915), through to his last leading r… Read More
2016-08-29 15:00
My five-year-old daughter enjoys watching the 2015 TV series Thunderbirds Are Go. Little does she know, or care, that the original Thunderbirds series, and also a movie with the exact title… Read More
2016-08-22 18:55
There is an eternal controversy regarding the ending of Bernard Shaw’s classic play Pygmalion and its various incarnations, apparently ever since its London premiere in 1914. This cont… Read More
2016-08-15 21:29
Banned in its own time, but highly influential on later French (and international) film, Jean Vigo’s Zéro de conduite (Zero for Conduct) is not to be missed.
The setting is a b… Read More
2016-08-08 10:03
Alfred Hitchcock’s early films are only rarely the suspense filled thrillers that we are used to from his later works. There are many dramas and a few comedies. Some are interesting on… Read More
2016-08-01 20:29
Even though Buster Keaton had an acting career of nearly 50 years, his greatest period can be narrowed down to only about six years, starting with Our Hospitality in 1923 and ending about 19… Read More
2016-07-25 21:54
I must confess that before I first saw The Kennel Murder Case, I had never heard of the character Philo Vance, and even after seeing the film, it was years before I realized that this was a… Read More
2016-07-18 11:20
I have previously written about all the other instalments in the classic four-part series about computer animation from the 1990s, The Mind’s Eye. The time has now come to the first pa… Read More
2016-07-11 12:49
The Second World War saw on both sides of the conflict a considerable rise in the quality of its cinematic propaganda material. One of the driving individuals behind the American material wa… Read More
2016-07-04 10:01
The Internet Archive is a strange site, but also rewarding. The structure leaves much to be desired, but the positive side is that in order to find what you are looking for, you are likely t… Read More
2016-06-27 20:15
This week, the new Tarzan film The Legend of Tarzan is scheduled for its worldwide premiere. While a new Tarzan film used to be a common occurrence (in the 1930s and 1940s there was usually… Read More
2016-06-20 21:10
This week’s film is best known as Reign of Terror, and it is so listed at the Internet Archive. However, it was also widely distributed as The Black Book, and it is that title which is… Read More
2016-06-13 09:23
On the official website of the film Samsara, you can read: “SAMSARA is a Sanskrit word that means ‘the ever turning wheel of life’ and is the point of departure for the fil… Read More
2016-06-06 20:47
Lon Chaney. That is all that really needs to be said, and the review could end here. But perhaps a few things about the film The Penalty should be added, just for clarity.
The plot is actua… Read More
2016-05-30 16:30
Over 70,000 people were killed as a direct result of Hitler’s Aktion T4 in the early stages of World War II. Some were jews, but many more were mentally or physically handicapped child… Read More
2016-05-23 16:17
Que viva Mexico! is one of those films which is interesting even before you have started watching it, because it is a fascinating history.
The brilliant Soviet film maker Sergei Eisenstein… Read More
2016-05-16 13:30
One film can often have many different titles, and it is not always easy to know which one to use. For Tsvet granata (Цвет гранат… Read More
2016-05-09 07:30
The classic The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), which I wrote about last week, was to my knowledge the first cooperation between director Robert Wiene and actor Conrad Veidt. Four years late… Read More
2016-05-02 12:47
If you investigate the history of the horror movie, you will find that sooner or later the tracks lead back to Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari, or as it is known in English, The Cabinet of Dr… Read More
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