Photo credit: Iain Macmillan
From Above Us Only Sky (2018)
Recently released on Blu-ray and DVD: Above Us Only Sky, The Mind Benders and Find Me Guilty.
Above Us Only Sky
In 1969, John Lennon withdrew from the bustle of The Beatles and the London scene and set camp on his rural estate, Tittenhurst Park. The white manor became a workplace as well as a home. At the studio Lennon built there, he recorded one of his greatest albums, Imagine.
For the documentary Above Us Only Sky, director Michael Epstein interviewed Julian Lennon, engineer Eddie Veale, musicians Klaus Voorman and Alan White and even John Dunbar, owner of London’s Indica Gallery, where Lennon met Yoko Ono. Epstein draws from a fantastic wealth of home movies and still photographs taken at Tittenhurst in 1969. Above Us Only Sky catches the era’s idealistic, if a bit bonkers, vibe, and it’s valuable for sympathetically showing the collaboration between Lennon and Ono. It documents the organic nature of the Imagine sessions, where some of the world’s greatest rock musicians recorded enduring songs together and in real time.
The Mind Benders
A distinguished professor with a troubled mien abruptly leaps to his death from a moving train. Military intelligence suspects he’s a traitor and his Oxford colleagues are covering up—but there’s more to the story. The 1963 British film is about a psychological experiment in isolation—in preparation for space flights—gone terribly wrong. The black and white cinematography is wonderfully ideal—a shadowland where the human psyche disintegrates in this engrossing, disturbing B picture.
Find Me Guilty
At this moment in political time, it’s disconcerting that Find Me Guilty opens with archival footage of a much younger Rudy Giuliani back when he was a mob-busting U.S. attorney. The 2006 film oddly flips perspective with its sympathetic post-“Sopranos” (“based” on reality) tale of Jack DiNorscio, the good-hearted gangster who acts as his own attorney. A superb performance by Vin Diesel—like Giuliani, much younger and with more hair—elevates the Sidney Lumet production.
