Michael Wood

The film opens,​ as the credits roll down the screen, with shots of present-day downtown Manhattan. The chief angle of vision is on the balcony of an expensive penthouse in Dumbo, as a part of Brooklyn is now called. The name recalls Walt Disney, of course, but like many New York neighbourhoods (SoHo, Tribeca) has a more literal or lettered source in the words ‘down under the Manhattan...

One of the​ signatures of classic film comedy is a kind of crazy grace amid peril, a performance of control where there seems to be none. We think of Harold Lloyd in Safety Last! hanging from the hands of a clock high above city streets, and dozens of moments involving Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. There is a reverse tradition, but it doesn’t produce classics, only extended...

The events​ of Danny Boyle’s new film, 28 Years Later, are not too far away. It’s set in the near future, but the prologue takes us back to 2002, which is when Boyle’s earlier film 28 Days Later was released. (There is also 28 Weeks Later, the 2007 sequel directed by Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, but this seems to borrow a piece of the storyline without becoming part of the...

Luis Buñuel​ worked at the Museum of Modern Art in New York between 1939 and 1941. His job was to select documentary films to be sent to Latin America, but he also, more notoriously, edited Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) with a view to turning its effect on its head. Heroic grandeur would become petty parading. The odds of success must have seemed good. Buñuel...

Mathieu Kassovitz’s​ film La Haine, regarded as a classic in many circles, is currently being shown in UK cinemas to mark the thirtieth anniversary of its release. ‘Classic’ may not be quite the right word for this scary, messy film – it’s about forms of rage that don’t add up to hatred, or indeed to anything – but this may reflect a deficiency in...