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Film and DVD

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The Fireman's Ball

The Fireman's Ball

(4 stars)12 Aug 2009

(PG) 73min (Arrow Films DVD retail) COMEDY/DRAMA Milos Amadeus Forman’s much loved 1967 Czech New Wave lynchpin has the honour of being one of only four films to be ‘banned forever’ by the Czech/Soviet authorities of the day who presumed it was…

Watcher In The Attic

Watcher In The Attic

(4 stars)12 Aug 2009

Noboru Tanaka’s bizarre and perverse 1974 adaptation of one of Edgowa Rampo’s celebrated horror stories (the Japanese Edgar Allan Poe) has long been unavailable on any format in the west so this release is great news for fans of the Japanese Nikkatsu…

Cult Fiction Movies Opens

Cult Fiction Movies shop opens in Edinburgh

6 Aug 2009

To a certain type of movie fan, Newington’s newly-opened Cult Fiction Movies is a magical store where a litany of grindhouse double features, BFI Classics and films from America’s Criterion Collection which remain currently unavailable on this side of…

Comrades

Comrades

(5 stars)30 Jul 2009

It’s criminal that the late, great Edinburgh-born filmmaker Bill Douglas’ epic account of the Tolpuddle Martyrs should remain largely unseen two decades after it was released. Perhaps a three-hour long, slow-moving drama that mixed two apparently…

The Red Shoes

The Red Shoes

(5 stars)30 Jul 2009

Martin Scorsese proclaimed Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s masterpiece ‘truly the most beautiful Technicolor film ever made.’ Marty should know, given he oversaw the restoration of the 1948 classic through his Film Foundation and then premiered…

Parade

Parade

(4 stars)30 Jul 2009

Released in 1974, the final film by the great French silent comedian Jacques Tati is a typically playful, though also extremely eloquent ending to his quarter-century film career. On the face of it nothing more than a series of circus acts compered by…

The Burrowers

Summer Horror DVD round-up

9 Jul 2009

First stop on our journey into the sinister world of horror is Arrow’s new ‘Masters of Giallo’ DVD imprint, launching with three decidedly depraved titles from a trio of Italian auteurs. Lamberto Bava’s Macabre (Arrow) ●●● is a dark psychosexual study…

Ultra

Ultra

(4 stars)9 Jul 2009

Ricky Tognazzi’s grim, but occasionally comical piece of social realism from 1990 might be seen as a fascinating insight into the kind of empty nihilism that has led to so many years of Berlusconi in Italy. In it, the lives of a group of Roma casuals…

Wild Geese II

Wild Geese II

(1 star)9 Jul 2009

If you’re a man of a certain age, chances are The Wild Geese made a lamentably unPC impact on your youth. So too, it’s likely that you found your way to the sequel, seven years later in 1985, but you don’t remember much about it. Here’s why: Peter…

Fine, Totally Fine

Fine, Totally Fine

(3 stars)9 Jul 2009

Less character-driven than character trait-driven, Yosuke Fujita’s film follows three youngish incompetents as they try to make the best of their lives, all played charmingly by well-known young Japanese actors. There is Yosiyosi Arakawa’s Teruo, the…

Max Manus: Man of War

Max Manus: Man of War

(4 stars)9 Jul 2009

This fact-based drama follows, somewhat in the manner of Black Book, the wartime experiences of the title character, a Norwegian resistance hero. As genre films go, Max Manus doesn’t wander far from tracks laid down for half a century, yet there’s a…

Funuke, Show Some Love, You Losers

Funuke, Show Some Love, You Losers

(3 stars)9 Jul 2009

A long-winded title for a film that ultimately runs out of puff, Funuke is at its best in the early stages. As a conceited struggling young actress comes back to her hometown after her parents’ death, Sumika (Sato Eriko) is as trapped in denial as she…

The Canterbury Tales

(3 stars)25 Jun 2009

ADAPTATION Made in 1971, the second of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s noted trilogy, The Canterbury Tales has much to admire about it, but doesn’t quite reach the heights of his earlier adaptation of The Decameron. The answer as to why this might be is…

The Romance of Astrea and Celadon

(3 stars)25 Jun 2009

After being accused of infidelity by his love, Astrea, shepherd Celadon (Andy Gilet) proves his faithfulness by throwing himself into a fast moving river, only to be revived later by a wealthy nymph and her companions. Will Astrea and Celadon ever…

The Exterminating Angels

(2 stars)25 Jun 2009

Not to be confused with the Buñuel film with a similar name; French auteur Jean-Claude Brisseau's erotic drama is a far more dubious proposition than the surrealist master would dare to offer. The Exterminating Angels concerns a film director François…

North Face

(3 stars)25 Jun 2009

In the summer of 1936 a group of climbers attempt the most taxing climb in the Alps, the north face of the Eiger. For some it is a personal effort; for other staunch nationalists it is a nod towards Nazi supremacy. Based on a true story, Philipp…

The Corner

(4 stars)25 Jun 2009

Long before The Wire became every two-bit critic’s all-time favourite show (be afraid people, even George Osborne is a fan) David Simon gave us The Corner, a relentlessly bleak mini-series which fleshed out the painful lives of West Baltimore’s most…

London in the Raw/Primitive London

London in the Raw/Primitive London

(4 stars)11 Jun 2009

DOCUMENTARY The British Film Institute launches its DVD strand Flipside with a pair of salacious dirty delights that certainly fulfil the mandate of the highbrow organisation to rediscover and reappraise overlooked and marginalised material.

Gardens in Autumn

Gardens in Autumn

(4 stars)11 Jun 2009

Anyone who’s seen Monday Morning by the Georgian Otar Iosseliani will know he is a filmmaker with a great sense of drift. He’s not interested in plot, but great on spatial texture, ably explored by the great cameraman William Lubtchansky. In Monday…

Alexandra

Alexandra

(4 stars)11 Jun 2009

Few filmmakers do melancholic intimacy better than Alexander Sokurov. Maybe it has to do with his fascination with capturing vulnerability and the presence of death, exemplified by Taurus (about the dying Lenin) and Mother and Son (where a mother passes…

An Empress and the Warriors

An Empress and the Warriors

(3 stars)11 Jun 2009

A sentimental story about honour and decency, duty and obligation, Tony Ching Siu Tung’s film is perfectly well made on its own terms, and even manages moments of surprising emotion amid the lazily maudlin. When the emperor dies, his upper-crust…

Meet Danny Wilson

Meet Danny Wilson

(3 stars)11 Jun 2009

This lesser known 1951 Frank Sinatra film was made at the time his career had stalled, two years after his only role of note at that point, in the Gene Kelly musical On the Town, and two years before he won an Oscar for From Here to Eternity, the film…

Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome

DVD Box Set Round-up

28 May 2009

Film historian, writer, avant-garde underground filmmaker and occultist Kenneth Anger is one of the more interesting individuals to have emerged from California’s Santa Monica hills in the second half of the 20th century. Anger and his work were…

Before Stonewall

Before Stonewall

28 May 2009

(87min) Forty years ago a small bar called the Stonewall Inn in a corner pocket of New York’s West Village sparked the legendary Stonewall riots that spearheaded the global gay liberation movement. In 1984, seasoned documentarian Greta Schiller shot…

Il Grido

(4 stars)28 May 2009

(12) 116min This less well-known Michelangelo Antonioni film from 1957 is evidence of the Italian auteur’s transition from his country’s post-war neo-realist style to the kind of filmmaking with which he established his international reputation.

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