Producer · Director · Screenwriter · 1936

Martin Rosen

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Smooth Talk

Joyce Chopra · 1985

Smooth Talk (1985), directed by Joyce Chopra and adapted by Tom Cole from Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, follows fifteen-year-old Connie Wyatt over a single summer week in northern California. Laura Dern stars as Connie, whose restless self-discovery collides with the predatory attention of Arnold Friend (Treat Williams). Shot by James Glennon and scored by Russ Kunkel, the film avoids melodrama in favour of psychological precision, building tension through proximity, tone, and withheld reaction. It won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize in 1986 and was restored by Criterion in 2020.

13:00

Women in Love

Ken Russell · 1969

Ken Russell’s 1969 Women in Love adapts D. H. Lawrence’s novel with fidelity to its psychological and philosophical core. Starring Glenda Jackson, Alan Bates, Oliver Reed, and Jennie Linden, it charts two sisters’ contrasting paths through love, intellect, and selfhood in post-war England and Switzerland. Billy Williams’s naturalistic cinematography and Georges Delerue’s restrained score support performances that prioritise presence over exposition. Though structurally uneven and occasionally opaque in its secondary arcs, the film remains a rare example of cinema treating ideas as visceral, not illustrative.

13:00

Watership Down

Martin Rosen, John Hubley · 1978

A small group of rabbits flees their doomed warren on a premonition of disaster and treks across the English countryside to found a new one, clashing along the way with the totalitarian warren of Efrafa under General Woundwort. Martin Rosen took over direction from John Hubley partway through production, financed the film through a British consortium, and released it in 1978 to an audience unsure what age it was made for.