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Michael Newton

Michael Newton is the author of Age of Assassins: A History of Conspiracy and Political Violence, 1865-1981 and Savage Girls and Wild Boys: A History of Feral Children (both Faber & Faber) and of a book on Kind Hearts and Coronets for the BFI Film Classics series. He has also edited The Penguin Book of Ghost Stories.

May 2020

  • Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby by Roman Polanski

    Lockdown culture
    House of horrors: how cinema turned a safe space into a trap

    Long before an age of lockdown, films from Rosemary’s Baby to The Shining and In the Shadow unveiled the home as the ultimate fear

April 2017

  • Bleakly absurd acts of violence … Kill List.

    Cults, human sacrifice and pagan sex: how folk horror is flowering again in Brexit Britain

    From Kill List to Blood on Satan’s Claw, celebrate May Day with a journey into the dark heart of the English countryside

November 2016

  • Sidney Poitier in In the Heat of the Night (1967).Character(s): Det. Virgil Tibbs Film 'IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT' (1967) Directed By NORMAN JEWISON 02 August 1967 CTJ27846 Allstar/UNITED ARTISTS (USA 1967) **WARNING** This Photograph is for editorial use only and is the copyright of UNITED ARTISTS and/or the Photographer assigned by the Film or Production Company & can only be reproduced by publications in conjunction with the promotion of the above Film. A Mandatory Credit To UNITED ARTISTS is required. The Photographer should also be credited when known. No commercial use can be granted without written authority from the Film Company.

    Officer and a gentleman: how Sidney Poitier united a divided America

    As Poitier’s 1967 film In the Heat of the Night is re-released in UK cinemas, it’s time to celebrate an actor whose dignity and restraint brought people together at a time of deep racial divisions

September 2016

  • Start Trek

    Star Trek at 50: myths, maidens and flirting on the final frontier

    Its sense of optimism could only have come out of the 1960s – so why have Star Trek’s visions of heroism, sexual politics and surrogate family life endured?

August 2016

  • Alan Garner for Saturday review

    Book of the day
    First Light review – a celebration of Alan Garner

    Children’s authors, a historian of witchcraft and a former archbishop of Canterbury pay tribute to a much-loved fantasy writer

July 2016

  • Barry Lyndon Ryan O’Neal

    Barry Lyndon: Kubrick's vision of a compromised life

    Barry Lyndon is perhaps Stanley Kubrick’s most charming protagonist – yet he is a bully, a deceiver and a snob

June 2016

  • 1977, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THIRD KIND<br>ALIEN SCENE Film 'CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND' (1977) Directed By STEVEN SPIELBERG 15 November 1977 SSN54729 Allstar/COLUMBIA (USA 1977) **WARNING** This Photograph is for editorial use only and is the copyright of COLUMBIA and/or the Photographer assigned by the Film or Production Company & can only be reproduced by publications in conjunction with the promotion of the above Film. A Mandatory Credit To COLUMBIA is required. The Photographer should also be credited when known. No commercial use can be granted without written authority from the Film Company.

    What Steven Spielberg's science fiction tells us about America

    Not just fantasies, Steven Spielberg’s visions of alien landings and artificial intelligence are also a barometer of a nation’s hopes and fears

May 2016

  • Still from the film Ride Lonesome

    Lonely rangers: the dark side of westerns

    The early cowboy movies were built on a simple moral struggle between goodies and baddies. So why did they so quickly evolve into psychologically bleak depictions of damaged souls?

January 2016

  • Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina at the Cannes film festival in 1962

    Jean-Luc Godard: the artist and his muse

    Jean-Luc Godard’s early films were distinct from each other in tone and form – romantic comedies, outlaw-chic, dystopian visions – connected only by the ‘shifting centre’ of his cinematic world, his wife and muse, Anna Karina

December 2015

  • Scrooge (Alastair Sim) and the Ghost of Christmas Present (Francis de Wolff) watching the Cratchit family.

    Bah, humbug! The many faces of Scrooge

    Stage and screen adaptations of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol have become as traditional as the goose. From Alastair Sim to the Muppets, Michael Newton chooses his favourite Scrooges – past, present and future

November 2015

  • Omar Sharif and Julie Christie in Doctor Zhivago (1965)

    Loved but not lost: David Lean’s Brief Encounter and Dr Zhivago

    Brief Encounter was laughed at by audiences when first released, and Dr Zhivago was scorned by critics. Now, argues Michael Newton, we can appreciate them as two of the greatest love stories committed to film

October 2015

  • BBC Schalcken the Painter

    Haunted half-hours – how the BBC made Christmas creepy

    To audiences hardened by the slick horrors of modern Halloween, the BBC’s ghost films from the 1970s can seem tame. But beware, these subtly unsettling works still have the power to frighten

August 2015

  • 1963, YESTERDAY TODAY AND TOMORROW

    Why Vittorio de Sica is one of Europe’s greatest tragic film-makers

    While his 1960s sex comedy Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, is charming, Vittorio De Sica’s early films offer marvellous explorations of defeat. A forthcoming retrospective season shows how the Italian director captured people as they are

July 2015

  • Orson Welles

    How Orson Welles shattered the Hollywood image

    Big, grizzled, with spit and stubble, Orson Welles dismantled the notion of what a movie star should look like. As it returns to cinemas, Michael Newton celebrates his Touch of Evil, the last great film noir of Hollywood’s golden age

May 2015

  • 1963, 8 1/2 , EIGHT AND A HALF

    Fellini’s 8½ – a masterpiece by cinema’s ultimate dreamer

    Federico Fellini never stuck to the facts. At his best, his films strike a perfect balance between fantasy and reality – and nowhere is this more evident than in his autobiographical classic, 8½

April 2015

  • 'Capacity for wonder' … Lily James as Ella in Disney's Cinderella (2015).

    From Snow White to Cinderella, the story of fairytales on film

    Genies, princesses, fairy godmothers … from Disney’s earliest days, cinema has always been enchanted by fairytales. With the new Cinderella on release, Michael Newton picks out moments of movie magic

March 2015

  • 1982, BLADE RUNNER

    Tears in rain? Why Blade Runner is timeless

    One of the greatest science fiction films ever made is about to be screened across the country in its definitive version. With its towering cityscapes, dreamy Vangelis soundtrack and nods to film noir, the movie offers a vision of a dystopian future devoid of human emotion . By Michael Newton

December 2014

  • An Autumn Tale

    Eric Rohmer: everyday miracles of a New Wave master

    Meeting for drinks. Going to the beach. Family dinners. Eric Rohmer was a visionary who dealt in the down-to-earth, argues Michael Newton, as the BFI prepares to celebrate the French director

October 2014

  • The Boy from Space

    Growing up with science fiction

    Science fiction on TV was often dark and disturbing – yet was somehow acceptable for children to watch. Ahead of a BFI season, Michael Newton revisits favourites of his childhood, from UFO to The Tomorrow People

September 2014

  • Peter Lorre M

    Peter Lorre: master of the macabre

    Fifty years after Peter Lorre's death, a season at the BFI celebrates an actor who flourished in the uneasy territory between the silly and the sinister. By Michael Newton

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