The Birds (1963)

Alfred Hitchcock's third Daphne du Maurier adaptation is her short story about birds attacking the residents of du Maurier's hometown of Cornwall, except the Master of Suspense transfers everything to San Francisco and extrapolates the bare context of the novella into a slow burn psychological drama featuring a Paris Hilton-type socialite with nothing better to do than to pull elaborate practical jokes on a potential new beau, but she has the ice cool smile wiped from her face when she finds herself trapped with him, his mother, his ex, his niece and his Oedipal complex in Bodega Bay, a small town under attack from even more unsettled birds!

★★★★★

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An Actor's Revenge (Yukinojō Henge) (雪之丞変化) (1963)

Full of fascinating Japanese culture references and mesmerising theatrical staging, this 1963 Kon Ichikawa movie is about a kabuki actor who plots slow, deliberate revenge against the men who wronged him years earlier and in that respect is like The Count of Monte Cristo but here the revenge-seeker fashions himself as a female impersonator.

★★★★☆

CINECAL: ONE SENTENCE REVIEWS