Film, Issue 575

San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is the most popular suicide destination in the world. For a whole year filmmaker Eric Steel filmed the iconic monument and those who took their lives there for his documentary The Bridge. Leigh Singer questions him

From Luchino Visconti’s 1963 masterpiece The Leopard to more recently Marco Tullio Giordana’s six-hour Best of Youth, Italians have always had a certain flair for the familial epic. Made in 1976, Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 (Novecento) (Fox, 4 Stars) is…

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Canosa’s parents were fundamentalist Christians who believed that movies are the devil’s work, so didn’t see a film at the cinema until he was 17 years old. On leaving home he was disinherited for attending Harvard College. He directed many plays and…

Goodbye Bafana (15) 118min (2 Stars) Well intentioned but dreary and overlong adaptation of the recanting memoirs of white Afrikaans warder James Gregory who was in charge of Nelson Mandela when he was imprisoned on Robben Island. Directed by Dane Bille…

Writer/director Craig Brewer does here for the blues what he did for hip hop in sleeper hit Hustle & Flow. In that film Brewer used the synoptic imagery contained in gangster rap to show the reformation of a pimp through music. Here he uses that most…

Written and directed by Mauritanian filmmaker Abderrahmane Sissako (Waiting for Happiness, Life on Earth), Bamako provides a refreshing African variation on the conventional political drama. Set in the backyard of a house in the Malian city of Bamako…

The French director Patrice Leconte seems drawn to unusual pairings: think of Juliette Binoche’s governor’s wife and Emir Kusturica’s condemned prisoner in The Widow of Saint Pierre; Jean Rochefort’s retired teacher and Johnny Hallyday’s bank-robber in…

‘Reach out you can touch it’s true/He’s not a shadow of shadows’ (‘Boy Child’, 1969). At last, a decent film about the most enigmatic music star to have come out of pop’s golden age. One third of the Walker Brothers, Jacques Brel obsessive, musical…

Every year a bunch of ill assorted Oxford undergraduates train to take part in various boxing matches against Cambridge students in order to earn their ‘Oxford Blues’. This cheap looking, clunky, soundtrack-heavy documentary initially seems to be as…

Apichatpong Weerasethakul made his reputation with his 2004 gay shape shifter jungle tale Tropical Malady, but this earlier outing is worth seeking out. Working as usual outside the strict Thai studio system, Weerasethakul is more interested in the…

If you’re yet to hear the name Cyrano de Bergerac and have no room in your brain for the knowledge that a film called The Graduate was ever made, then The Best Man might seem a breath of fresh air. When a struggling writer (Stuart Townsend) is asked to…

To coincide with the DVD release of Kevin MacDonald’s excellent fictional feature The Last King of Scotland comes the re-emergence of this disturbing and illuminating 1974 biographical portrait of Idi Amin by German filmmaker Barbet Schroeder (Barfly…

We’ve been banging on about the return of deranged visionary filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky for so long that we could hardly overlook, however briefly, this six-disc box set featuring three of the master’s films. El Topo and The Holy Mountain are his…

Blake Edwards’ 1974 cold war jape was sumptuously shot in widescreen by Freddie Young, presumably to fit stars of the then magnitude - Omar Sharif and Julie Andrews. Andrews is the humble British civil servant to Sharif’s military attaché from the…