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The success of Star Wars and blockbusters in general led to studios trying to emulate that success.  In 1983 veteran film maker Peter Yates wanted to combine sci-fi, fantasy and swashbuckling to create an original film that follows Prince Colwyn and his group of outlaws on the planet Krull to save future queen Princess Lyssa from the Beast and his constantly teleporting Black Fortress, they named...

Fitzcarraldo is a 1982 film written and directed by German Icon Werner Herzog and starring infamous actor Klaus Kinski in what would be their penultimate collaboration. The film is based upon a real life rubber baron who transported a disassembled steamboat over land to secure his Rubber trade. In the film however Fitzcarraldo undertakes this feat to secure enough money to bring Opera to his jungl...

Films rarely come as small as this, in 1981 New York City theatre bona fides Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory started recording their conversations, this would all lead to them writing a small two header screenplay where two old friends catch up over dinner. This became My Dinner With Andre , where the two fictionalised versions of the actors have a conversation which drifts between the nature of h...

It's 1980 and with the help of filmmaker James Raynor we are covering when flamboyant and controversial British Director Ken Russell went Hollywood and directed a science-fiction horror film based on a Oscar award winning writer Paddy Chayefsky's novel and screenplay, Altered States . A film which was dogged by disagreements on the set. It tells the story of a research scientist experiments, playe...

Start a new miniseries! Swallow this! We are going to explore the 1980s in film and to start us off we have a special bonus episode looking at, for us, the most influential horror movie franchise of the 80s. The Evil Dead was the brain child of director Sam Raimi, producer Rob Tapert, and actor Bruce Campbell, who fought to generate financing to create their horror film where a group of teens go t...

It's our decade round up episode, the Trackies! Where we give out awards for the films we watched on this miniseries and as always we are joined by our friend Brandon Kahn to chat about what we learnt from this selection of films, the 50s in films and what we liked best. Also we announce our next miniseries. Follow us on: Twitter:  @adjustyrtrack  & Instagram: @betterfeelingfilms

In the 1950s Alfred Hitchcock was hitting the height of him fame and yet again teaming up with James Stewart and Grace Kelly he made Rear Window a film where a professional photographer is stuck in his apartment, recuperating from a broken leg and this boredom, leads him to spy on his neighbours and comes to the realisation that one of them was responsible for the murder of his wife, and sets out...

The only film that Charles Laughton ever directed as 1955's The Night of the Hunter , starring Robert Mitchum, Shelley Winters, and Lillian Gish. The plot focuses on the relentless pursuit of two children from a serial-killing preacher who wants to steal the $10,000 hidden by their executed bank-robbing father. A critical and commercial failure on it's release, it is now considered an incredibly i...

Comedian and Podcaster Lorcan Mullan joins us to discuss the French New Wave classic The 400 Blows starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, Albert Rémy, and Claire Maurier. The film was directed by former critic and ‘Gravedigger of Cinema’ François Truffaut who directed the film in 1959 after he was banned from Cannes festival for his overly harsh reviews of current French cinema and as a reaction was encourag...

Ollie invites James Raynor back on the show to talk about one of the most seminal films of all time in Godzilla , Ishirō Honda didn't just make an iconic monster film he invented a total worldwide pop culture icon, including thirty-two films produced by Toho, four Hollywood films and numerous video games, novels, comic books and television shows. All stemming from this 1954 classic, join us as we...

Orson is back! 1958's Touch of Evil was considered for a long time the most forgettable film of Orson Welles' career, he had been removed from the final edit of the film and eventually the studio dumped the film into a b-picture release and it was largely forgotten by critics and audiences alike. That is until an earlier cut was found, and a 58 page memo written by Orson at the time detailing the...

The Seventh Seal is a 1957 Swedish historical fantasy film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, it has become an icon in cinema becoming a veritable shorthand for arthouse cinema and inspiring countless homages and parodies, meaning it has cemented itself in social consciousness. The film itself tells the story of a medieval knight (Max von Sydow), who after returning from the Crusades finds hi...

If there are two names that are synonymous with the western it is John Ford and John Wayne, who over their career together made countless Westerns that came to define the genre, and American film making. The Searchers , from 1956 is possibly not only their most epic but the most defining film of each of their career. It has come to be seen as one of the most influential films of all time, and has...

The blacklisting and expulsion of Jules Dassin from Hollywood after he was named in the House of Unamerican Activities, meant that the director ended up taking on this adaption of a French crime novel, a turning it into a noir classic that ties French filmmaking with American action, in something quite unique. Rififi was a sensation in 1955, earning Dassin Best Director at Cannes, and earning rave...

Natalie Gardner joins Liam to discuss the 1950 film All About Eve , a giant film of the 1950's, getting a record amount of Academy Award nominations. Directed by Joseph Mankiewicz starring the amazing Bette Davis (who we particularly gush over in the episode) as Margo Channing, a highly regarded but aging Broadway star and Anne Baxter playing Eve Harrington, an ambitious young fan who manoeuvres h...

We're back! But instead of our scheduled miniseries episode we are taking a a small detour to explore some other films of the 50s, while Ollie is busy with his new music video. Brandon Kahn is here and he has brought along a 1958 French Noir classic which can be seen as a precursor to the French New Wave, Elevator to the Gallows, where two lovers' seemingly perfect murder plan goes awry due to a b...

As it is Christmas we've decided to celebrate the festive season on the podcast by watching a largely forgotten Disney film from 1985. One Magic Christmas positions itself as being a wonderful tale of Christmas but it is northing short of a depressing horror story. Where Santa decides, in order to teach the message of Christmas to a mother played by Mary Steenburgen, he needs to take some rather e...

Man's atomic age is here, horrifying hordes appear! Exo-Skeleton armor, Exo-Skeleton might, Exo-Skeleton horror, Exo-Skeleton bite. Beware of them! Gordon Douglas' Them! is a 1954 horror movie that started the trend for 'big bug' movies, which became a huge trend in horror combining a fear of invasion, nuclear power and insects which summarised 50s fears. Staring James Whitmore, Edmund Gwenn, Joan...

In 1953 trailblazing director Ida Lupino made the first ever Hollywood film noir shot by a woman. The Hitch-Hiker tells the story of two fishing buddies (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) who pick up a paranoid hitchhiker (William Talman) during a trip to Mexico, who turns out to be a psychopath who had committed multiple murders. The film was based upon a true crime story of Billy Cook and it sho...

MGM and Vincente Minnelli's The Bad and the Beautiful is an unblinking look at hubris and ego in Hollywood's Golden Era. Kirk Douglas stars as Hollywood producer Jonathan Shields, and we see his career through the three peoples personal experiences; director Fred Amiel (Barry Sullivan), movie star Georgia Lorrison (Lana Turner), and screenwriter James Lee Bartlow (Dick Powell), who explain how he...

When it comes to a name in British comedy, Ealing Studios is a name that has persisted throughout the years. Alec Guinness had made his name for these comedies and in 1951 he was teaming up with Alexander Mackendrick to make a strange science fiction comedy about an unassuming scientist who makes a fabric that is both indestructible and doesn't stain, and the fall out which occurs when both the te...

It's new miniseries time! We've jumped back in time again to the 1950s. The decade where the Cold War started, rock-n-roll was a scary new music form, home television for the first time became commonplace and also the decade where Japanese cinema was introduced to the world. Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, starring Toshiro Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Masayuki Mori, and Takashi Shimura, introduced such a stron...

We're back from hiatus! Just a quick bonus episode this week to wrap up our 70s miniseries. Brandon Kahn joins us to help present our Trackies, awards for the films we watched in the last miniseries, rank the ten films and also also allows us to bookend and chat about what we learnt about 70s cinema.  All ready for next week where we will dive into the 1950s. We had a bit of a technical issue with...

In 1978 they said 'you'll believe a man can fly', and we wanted to see if that was still the case. We chose Richard Donner's classic Superman for our 1970s rewatch to close out or 70s miniseries, starring Marlon Brando, Gene Hackman, Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder, plus many more. It's a superhero epic. Everyone knows the story, Kal-El, thanks to Jor-El, is the last survivor of the planet Kry...

In 1970 one of the most influential animators of all time, Chuck Jones (Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies), directed his only feature film The Phantom Tollbooth , based on a novel by Norton Juster,  tells the story of a bored young boy named Milo. Unexpectedly receiving a magic tollbooth and, having nothing better to do, Milo drives through it and enters a kingdom in turmoil following the loss of i...