Author Spotlight

Philip Kemp

Philip Kemp is a freelance reviewer, film historian, and regular contributor to Sight & Sound and Total Film. He teaches film journalism at the University of Leicester in England.

13 Results
Moonrise: Dark of the Moon

In his uncharacteristic final masterpiece, the great Hollywood melodramatist Frank Borzage approaches the shadowy violence of film noir with his unique brand of romanticism.

By Philip Kemp

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog: The First True Hitchcock Movie

After nearly a decade of honing his craft, Alfred Hitchcock firmly established his reputation with this silent thriller.


By Philip Kemp

Charulata: “Calm Without, Fire Within”

Satyajit Ray’s delicate masterpiece about forbidden love in the late nineteenth century is lovingly adapted from a novella by the great Rabindranath Tagore.

By Philip Kemp

The Ballad of Narayama: Abandonment

Keisuke Kinoshita’s most experimental film is a resplendent, kabuki-inspired, folk-derived drama about mortality.

By Philip Kemp

Shallow Grave: A Film Called Cruel

Tasteful British cinema got a refreshing dose of amorality with Danny Boyle’s stylish and violent tale of greed and paranoia.

By Philip Kemp

The Music Room: Distant Music
In May 1956, an Indian film was screened at the Cannes Film Festival. It wasn’t well attended. The Indian delegation had done little to promote it, arranging only a single midnight screening that clashed with a party in honor of Akira Kurosawa. In …

By Philip Kemp

Au revoir les enfants: Childhood’s End

“Do you realize,” muses the twelve-year-old Julien Quentin, rapt in the solipsism of early adolescence, “that there’ll never be another January 17, 1944? Never again? . . . I’m the only one in this school who thinks about death. It’s i

By Philip Kemp

A Time of Honor:Seven Samurai and Sixteenth-Century Japan

There’s an old Chinese curse that runs, “May you live in interesting times.” And sixteenth-century Japan was certainly an interesting time from a dramatic point of view—which is undoubtedly why Akira Kurosawa chose it as Seven Samurai’s

By Philip Kemp

Night Train to Munich: A Last Laugh
“Wittily written and spare as a coded message . . . The year’s most perilous ride . . . , we wouldn’t exchange it for a season’s commutation ticket on most of the similar vehicles running out of Hollywood.” So wrote Theodore Strauss in t…

By Philip Kemp

The Human Condition: The Prisoner

Masaki Kobayashi’s towering antiwar saga embodies the postwar Japanese conscience by tracing the moral degradation of a principled dissident.

By Philip Kemp

Kind Hearts and Coronets: Ealing’s Shadow Side

Robert Hamer’s witty, ironic tale of calculating serial killer breaks the beloved mold of the Ealing comedy.

By Philip Kemp

Casque d’or: Tenderness and Violence

Along with Touchez pas au grisbi and Le Trou, Casque d’or is now widely recognized as the summit of Jacques Becker’s achievement as a filmmaker.

By Philip Kemp

Touchez pas au grisbi: A Neglected Master

Jacques Becker may well be the most seriously underestimated director in the history of French cinema. Even in his own lifetime, he suffered disparaging comments. Wrote Jacques Demeure about Touchez pas au grisbi in a 1957 Positif article: “Here we

By Philip Kemp