Tony McKibbin

Half Moon

18 Sep 2008

DRAMA (PG) 107min (ICA DVD retail) *** Mamo (Ishmail Ghaffari), a brusque Kurdish musician living in Iran has spent months trying to arrange a permit for one final concert in Kurdish Iraq. When this is resolved, his problems really start. He…

Profile: Dennis Gansel

18 Sep 2008

Name Dennis Gansel. Born Hanover, Germany, 1973. Background Gansel studied at Munich where he shot a couple of short films. After graduating he went on to make Phantom, a film for television about the Red Army Faction, the self-styled youthful freedom…

Still Life

18 Sep 2008

DRAMA (15) 109min (BFI DVD retail) Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke (Platform, Unknown Pleasures) hails from the tradition of Asian long-take, observational masters that include Hou Hsiao-hsien and Tsai Ming-liang, but Zhang-ke’s work often has a…

The Liar

18 Sep 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 88min (Bluebell DVD retail) *** Written by and starring Finnish auteur Aki Kaurismaki and directed by his brother Mika, The Liar is an early 1980s monochrome mood piece with the nouvelle vague echoing in the distance. One critic…

The Wave (Die Welle)

18 Sep 2008

THRILLER/DRAMA (15) 107min A slickly produced examination of how fascism can enter everyday life, The Wave is a peer pressure teen drama where much of the heat comes from above, noticeably Jürgen Vogel’s high school teacher who wonders what will…

The Pope's Toilet (El Baño del Papa)

4 Sep 2008

DRAMA (EL BANO DEL PAPA) (15) 98min Like the recent Couscous, The Pope’s Toilet works up a great deal of narrative tension out of what are very believable anxieties. Its strength is that it generates a plot out of real life and real concerns.

Trouble In Mind

21 Aug 2008

CRIME/DRAMA ‘A little bit of everybody belongs in hell’ say Kris Kristofferson’s former cop, a man who’s recently served time for killing a mobster. Then there is Keith Carradine’s man on the make who changes his image from country boy to androgynous…

Elegy

7 Aug 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (15) 112min Philip Roth, arguably America’s greatest living writers (and certainly one of the major chroniclers of middle class ennui), hasn’t been well served by adaptations. Goodbye, Columbus (1969), Portnoy’s Complaint (1972) and The…

Film Books Round-up

17 Jul 2008

In terms of wealth of research and weightiness of tome Richard Brody’s biography of Jean-Luc Godard, Everything is Cinema (Faber) ••••, should be a masterpiece. Yet for all its detail Godard remains an enigma, and this seems neither for want of research…

La Leon

17 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 78min (Soda DVD retail) There’s a formal rigour to so many of the films coming out of Argentina that it’s a pity many of them – Lucretia, Martel and Lisandro, Alonso excepted – haven’t worked through the subtle storytelling elements…

My Winnipeg

17 Jul 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL DRAMA (15) 79min Guy Maddin is a most acquired taste. Filming in black and white and creating images that resemble silent cinema, Maddin (The Saddest Music in the World) is a postmodernist with a yearning for a time when…

Intimate Enemies

3 Jul 2008

WAR (15) 100min (Contender DVD retail) Will the Algerian war turn the humanist lieutenant at the centre of Florent Emilio Siri’s film into a monstrous shadow of his former self? After being posted to Algeria, Terrien (Benoît Magimel), the…

Paris Lockdown

3 Jul 2008

GANGSTER (18) 143min (Momentum DVD retail/rental) This brutally efficient, thoroughly gratuitous French gangster film from Frédéric Schoendorffer, director of Scene de Crime and Spy Bound, explores the lives of various gangsters on the make.

Tick Tock Lullaby

3 Jul 2008

DRAMA (15) 72min (Peccadillo DVD retail) In one particular scene of this film, a good looking thirty-something notices that he’s been trailed by a couple of ladies, and comments that it’s the first time he’s been cruised by two gay women, and that…

14 Kilometres (14 Kilometros)

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

This issue-driven Spanish drama isn’t afraid to draw on several stock clichés of the well-trodden road movie genre. Three Africans undertake the arduous journey from Niger to Spain, crossing deserts, trying to get through corrupt border controls and…

Eat, For This is My Body

Edinburgh International Film Festival

19 Jun 2008

(Michelange Quay, Haiti/France) 105min Quay’s semi-abstract look at colonial elements in Haiti is comparable to two 1980s touchstones, Marion Hänsel’s Dust and Claire Denis’ Chocolat. While there is an impressive opening shot that glides over the…

Bandit Queen

22 May 2008

DRAMA (18) 115min (Metrodome) Made in 1994 Shekhar Kapur’s (Elizabeth) brutal retelling of the true story of Phoolan Devi, India’s only modern day female outlaw is still a compellingly tough watch. Jailed in 1983 and released in the year Bandit…

Jade Warrior

22 May 2008

MYTH/ROMANCE (12) 100min (Yume) This potentially fascinating attempt to combine two mythologies: ancient Chinese martial arts with Finnish legend, The Kalevala is, as the blurb tell us, ‘the first ever Finnish martial arts film’. May it also be the…

Strays

22 May 2008

ROMANCE/DRAMA (15) 79mins (Revolver) Although a big name now, Vin Diesel couldn’t get work before this film was nominated for a Grand Jury Prize in Sundance back in 1997. Written, directed and produced by the man of muscle himself, this is half…

Indiscretion of an American Wife

24 Apr 2008

DRAMA (U) 69min (Freemantle DVD rental/retail) Coming in at just over an hour, this is a film that can be found in different versions (another one goes under the title of Terminal Station). This one’s strength lies in another of Montgomery Clift’s…

A Very British Gangster

10 Apr 2008

DOCUMENTARY (15) 98min (Contender DVD retail) A strange amalgam of fiction film devices and impressive access, Donal MacIntyre’s look at the life of infamous Manchester gangster Dominic Noonan is compelling viewing. As he follows the Noonan crime…

In Memory of Me

10 Apr 2008

DRAMA (U) 114min (Artificial Eye DVD retail) What happens when life no longer tastes so sweet? One option is to undergo a period of spiritual training that will eventually lead to the priesthood. As with much of the best Italian cinema in recent…

Naked Youth

10 Apr 2008

TEEN DRAMA (15) 97min (Yume DVD retail) As Noel Burch in his key tome on Japanese cinema, To The Distant Observer, has noted, the disaffected youth film was popular in the aspirant years of the late 50s and early 60s. This film, Nagisa Oshima’s 1960…

Bloody Sunday

27 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 110min (Optimum DVD retail) Better known for his bigger budget work on The Bourne Supremacy/Ultimatum films and United 93, Paul Greengrass’ 2002 docudrama showing the events that led up to the tragic incident on 30 January 1972 in Derry…

Coup De Torchon

27 Mar 2008

THRILLER (15) 123min (Optimum DVD retail) Adapted from a Jim Thompson novel by Bertrand Tavernier, this loose adaptation shows local police officer Lucien Cordier (Philippe Noiret) in an African colony in 1938 inefficiently doing his job while being…

Welcome to the Jungle

27 Mar 2008

HORROR (18) 78min (Optimum DVD rental/retail) A kind of cannibal version of The Blair Witch Project, this low-budget outing follows four characters into New Guinea as they pursue the trail taken many years before by Michael Rockefeller, the heir to…

Benny's Video

13 Mar 2008

DRAMA (15) 105min (Tartan DVD retail) ‘How beastly the bourgeoisie is,’ DH Lawrence once proposed, and they don’t get much worse than in Benny’s Video. Not that the parents in Michael Funny Games Haneke’s film are especially cruel or vindictive, it’s…

We Are Together

13 Mar 2008

DOCUMENTARY (PG) 86min Whether the tragedy is personal or universal, filmmaker Paul Taylor manages to extract an upbeat film out of harrowing and difficult lives in this moving documentary. Concentrating on the Agape Orphanage in South Africa, Taylor…

Paul Taylor - We Are Together

28 Feb 2008

Director Paul Taylor had just finished his first year studying film at Bournemouth in 2003 when he went off and worked for a few months at the Agape Orphanage in South Africa. A year later he returned with a camera and documented the kids. In some ways…

Bergman: The Faith Trilogy

28 Feb 2008

DRAMA (15) 260min (Tartan DVD retail) As with much of Ingmar Bergman’s work this trilogy of early 60s films on the issue of faith are really chamber pieces, where a sense of claustrophobia weighs heavily on the characters’ lives. Whether that’s the…

Don't Touch The Axe

28 Feb 2008

DRAMA/ROMANCE (PG) 138min Adapted from Balzac’s The Duchess of Langeais, Jacques Rivette’s latest film tells the tragic story of a French general Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), back from a difficult trip in Africa, who falls for married…

Afghan film festival

14 Feb 2008

FESTIVAL For exasperated introductions to the complexities of Afghanistan’s political situation it is difficult to beat Atiq Rahini’s (A)fghanistan: An Impossible State. Rahini simply allows the attending members of a loya jirga (political gathering…

Omagh

14 Feb 2008

DRAMA (15) 102min (Optimum DVD retail/rental) On August 15 1998 a peaceful small town was blown apart both literally and figuratively by a bomb blast that killed and wounded many of its citizens. Written by Paul United 93 Greengrass but directed by…

Opera Jawa

14 Feb 2008

MUSICAL (12) 120min (Yume Pictures DVD retail/rental) One of a handful of films commissioned to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth, this generally hugely successful project (other films in the series have included Syndromes and a…

Reel Afghanistan - Afghan film festival

8 Feb 2008

'Culture and lifestyle are the diplomacy of the 21st century,’ claims Simon Jenkins in a recent article in The Guardian, suggesting that where in the past cultural exchange relied on diplomats - on men in suits - today it comes in myriad forms: travel…

Road Games - DVD review

Thriller

31 Jan 2008

Made in 1981 as a star vehicle for then rising star Stacy Keach, this likeable Aussie road movie from Richard Psycho II Franklin is hampered by American influences. Not just with Keach, who chews up the scenery with all the curious self-loving diction…

Invisible Waves

17 Jan 2008

DRAMA (18) 115min (Tartan DVD retail/rental) Half noir, half melancholic meditation on sins that won’t go away, Last Life in the Universe director Pen-ek Ratanaruang’s film is a mixture of the clumsy and the allusively accomplished. Sometimes it…

Sherrybaby

17 Jan 2008

DRAMA (15) 92min (Metrodome DVD retail/rental) A useful companion piece to the much more lauded Half Nelson, this story about a woman trying to get her life together after a prison sentence and a drug habit, utilises a quirky visual style to…

Slacker

17 Jan 2008

COMEDY/DRAMA (15) 93min (Metrodome rental/retail) Originally released in 1991, Richard Linklater’s fine low-budget second feature may bring to mind one of contemporary cinema’s most over-used storytelling devices: the multiple character tale. But…

A Successful Man

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (12A) 104min (Network DVD retail) Along with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Strawberry and Chocolate, The Twelve Chairs), Humberto Solás is one of the most prominent of the filmmakers to emerge from Castro’s Cuba, and this film from the 1980s is…

Beloved

4 Jan 2008

DRAMA (12A) 100min (Network DVD retail) After her wealthy slave-trading father’s death, Amada (Eslinda Núñez) wiles away her time on his estate, living with her blind mother and her unfaithful husband. Clearly she wants and deserves more from…

The Twelve Chairs

4 Jan 2008

COMEDY DRAMA (12A) 93min (Network DVD rental/retail) When Hipolito (Enriqye Saniesteban) hears that his dying mother-in-law has left a fortune in jewels stashed away in one of her dozen imported chairs, he determines to find the missing fortune.

A Silent Duel - DVD review

(12) 94min

13 Dec 2007

Akira Kurosawa was, more than most, a director who worked both in miniature and epic form. Where Ikiru, Dodesukaden and Madadayo cover the intimate, there are also the many epics, from Seven Samurai to Yojimbo, Kagemusha to Ran offering something more…

I Don't Want to Sleep Alone - interview with Tsai Ming-liang

29 Nov 2007

Tsai Ming-liang is one of the great contemporary filmmakers. Tony McKibbin meets him. Like Béla Tarr, Abbas Kiarostami, Wong Kar-wai, Lars Von Trier and Hou Hsiao-Hsien, Asian filmmaker Tsai Ming-liang has contributed in proving that if the great…

A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash

29 Nov 2007

DOCUMENTARY (PG) 83min With The Guardian recently offering the front page headline ‘World economy shakes as oil nears $100 a barrel’, A Crude Awakening is nothing if not pertinent, giving credence to the film’s thesis that it isn’t money that…

Syndromes and a Century

29 Nov 2007

DRAMA (15) 106min Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s undeniably mysterious film is loosely based on his parents’ experience of working in a rural hospital in Thailand. As with the director’s other work (notably 2002’s Blissfully Yours and Tropical Malady…

Hitler – A Career

15 Nov 2007

Hardly justifying a DVD release, this 1970s-made steady trot through Hitler’s rise and fall has the sanctimonious tone of an admonition. Joachim C Fest’s film is less a warning from history and more a sustained attack of Hitler’s one-dimensional…

Kisses

15 Nov 2007

TEEN DRAMA (15) 74min (Yume Pictures DVD retail) In some ways resembling a Japanese Rebel Without a Cause, Yasuzo Blind Beast Masumura’s sweet romantic debut feature film from 1957 offers hyperbolised family problems to bring out the best in the…

When the Trumpets Fade

15 Nov 2007

WAR DRAMA (15) 85min (Arrow DVD Retail) Brit John Irvin directed this HBO-produced WWII-set film which concentrates on the bloody, drawn out, all but forgotten battle at Hürtgen Forest on the border between Belgium and Germany in the winter of…

Les Bronzes

1 Nov 2007

This surprisingly engaging little 1978 comedy by Patrice Leconte ( My Best Friend, The Hairdresser’s Husband ) was a huge hit in France when it was released. Managing to be both cynical and warm as it takes a jaundiced look at the holidaying French…

Madadayo

1 Nov 2007

There is a very good reason why Akira Kurosawa’s final film from 1993 remains little known: it is about as bad a film as one is likely to get from a great filmmaker. Stuck with a dull central character, Hyakken Uchida (Tetsuo Matsumura), who spends most…

Romuald et Juliette

1 Nov 2007

With broad hindsight it can often seem that too many French films made in the 80s centred around life swapping scenarios or sudden shifts in perspective and expectation – whether that happened to be Bertrand Blier with mischievous satires like Tenue de…

Labyrinth of Passion

4 Oct 2007

(18) 94min (Tartan/DVD Retail) SCREWBALL MELODRAMA It was with this, Pedro Almodovar’s second film, made in 1982, that the brand of melodrama which has become known as ‘Almodorama’ – essentially a combination of melodrama and screwball comedy…

Of Mice and Men

4 Oct 2007

(PG) 106min (Arrow/ DVD Retail) DRAMA Made only a couple of years after the John Steinbeck novel was published, this respectful 1939 adaptation by Lewis Milestone tells the now famous story of the wily and slight George (Burgess Meredith) and his…

The Ex

4 Oct 2007

(15) 90min (Icon/Rental) COMEDY Meet the Parents meets There’s Something About Mary with a bit of Garden State thrown in for good measure just about sums up the hardly original but often amusing latest Zach Braff vehicle. Playing a husband who’s…

They Fought For Their Motherland

20 Sep 2007

WAR DRAMA (15) 137min (Nouveaux Pictures/DVD retail) Like Sergei Bondarchuk’s earlier Destiny of a Man, this is taken from a book by Mikhail Sholokhov, a writer best known for And Quiet Flows the Don. Unlike that film, this is a multi-character…

Destiny of a Man

6 Sep 2007

Probably best known for his six hour adaptation of War and Peace (also recently released on DVD), Sergei Bondarchuk’s 1959 debut feature is no meagre effort. As he tells the story of a Soviet citizen, Andrei Sokolov (played by the director himself…

New Films New Talents: Best of Scottish Shorts

6 Sep 2007

Scottish Screen presents a selection of films it funded in 2006, and there are some excellent shorts here, including Zam Salim’s award winning Laid Off, a jaundiced and funny take on death as the equivalent of unemployment, where nobody recognizes your…

The Legacy - profile of Géla Babluani

6 Sep 2007

Name Géla Babluani Born Tblisi, Georgia, 1979 Who is he? Babluani comes from a filmmaking family; his father, Temur, started making films back in 1980. With the violent uprisings taking place in Georgia, Temur sent his kids to study abroad. Gela…

Manufacturing Dissent: Unconvering Michael Moore

23 Aug 2007

Is Michael Moore a self-regarding political liability who also screws with journalistic codes of conduct, or a wayward truth seeker who has no truck with compromise as he pursues fairness and justice? We probably didn’t need Deborah Melnyk and Rick…

My American Uncle

(18) 125min (Arrow DVD rental/retail)

23 Aug 2007

Working from, but in no way limited by the behavioural theories of Henri Laborit, Alain Resnais’ 1980 film shows us Laborit explaining how our behaviour often resembles that of the animal kingdom, but also how humans complexly deviate from it. Resnais…

State of the World

23 Aug 2007

Portmanteau films are always hard to pull off. After the carbohydrate rich, protein poor dish that was Paris, je t’aime, this six short film look at the state of the world is much more demanding. No film more so than Wang Bing’s Brutality Factory…

I Served the King of England

16 Aug 2007

On paper this looks like a dream project. Major Czech ‘Prague Spring’ filmmaker Jirí Menzel adapts Bohumil Hrabal’s much loved comic novel and tries to recapture the delights of their earlier bittersweet 1966 collaboration, Closely Observed Trains. The…

The Man from London (A London férfi)

16 Aug 2007

Despite its troublesome and lengthy production history, Hungarian master auteur Béla Tarr’s newest film is another work of elegant despair. Closer to his 1988 film Damnation than the more recent Sátántangó or Werckmeister Harmonies in its length and…

Mother and Son

(U) 71min (Artificial Eye DVD retail)

9 Aug 2007

DRAMA Aleksandr Sokurov’s masterful meditation on death – not as a clinical medical demand but as an immediate, emotionally vivid experience – is one of the greatest of modern films. As we see the son (Aleksei Ananishnov) caring for his dying mother…

Number One, Longing. Number Two, Regret

(15) 98min (Peccadillo Pictures DVD rental/retail)

9 Aug 2007

THRILLER Former computer man John Spears (Paul Conway) is arrested on suspicion of murdering a neighbour. Detective Kenosha (Jenny Agutter) becomes fascinated by the case and tries to work out whether or not he’s guilty. Debut filmmaker Neil…

Twisted Sister

(Ed Herzog, Germany, 2006) 94min

9 Aug 2007

Anna (Heike Makatsch) is an apparently successful thirty-something in the music industry, but when she takes a holiday in Spain with her timid younger sister, Marie (Anna Maria Mühe) she turns into a nightmare. Anna makes every event into a…

Human Resources

1 Aug 2007

Franck (Jalil Lespert) is an enthusiastic business student in Paris who returns to his hometown to do an internship at the factory where his father works. The only problem is he’s expected to be involved in a restructuring process, which means laying…

Perth

1 Aug 2007

The title isn’t where this Singapore film is set; it’s simply the city in Australia that our central character dreams of moving to, a place without the corruption and poverty of his immediate surroundings.

Borderline

DVD

16 Jul 2007

SILENT MELODRAMA BORDERLINE (12) 72min (BFI retail) Kenneth Macpherson’s film tackles issues of race and sexual triangles head on, and with a cinematic inventiveness, in keeping with the radical commitment of those involved. MacPherson was…

DVD - Sacred Heart

2 Jul 2007

DRAMA Ferzan Hamam: Turkish Bath Ozpetek’s latest film plays a little like a combination of two much better, fairly recent Italian works which haven’t received a wide release: The Spectator and Marco Bellocchio’s My Mother’s Smile (both available on…

Film Books Round-up

19 Jun 2007

In Talking Movies (Wallflower, 4 Stars) Jason Wood interviews more than 30 contemporary filmmakers including Carlos Reygadas, Richard Linklater, Atom Egoyan, Lucrecia Martel, Elia Suleiman and Nuri Bilge Ceylan. Wood’s project is wonderfully…

Moloch

DVD

19 Jun 2007

Where his mentor Andrei Tarkovsky would often take the ordinary and turn it into the extraordinary, filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov frequently works a partial reverse. In his trilogy of ‘dictator’ films, Tauras (about Lenin), The Sun (about Hirohito) as…

Trio

DVD

21 May 2007

DRAMA ‘If you like to take the [leading] character as a flattering portrait of the old party before you, you’re perfectly at liberty to do so.’ Thus the great British writer Somerset Maugham himself introduces the third story in this 1950 adaptation…

DVD - Blissfully Yours

7 May 2007

DRAMA

The Tamarind Seed

7 May 2007

ROMANTIC THRILLER

DVD - Bridging The Gap: Lies

Bridging The Gap: Lies

11 Apr 2007

DOCUMENTARY SHORTS This collection of short documentaries from the all too often undervalued and under funded Scottish Documentary Institute serves as a welcome taster for the excellent work executed by this organisation. The best of the films here…

DVD - Romeo, Juliet and Darkness

Romeo, Juliet and Darkness

11 Apr 2007

ROMANCE Jirí Weiss’ fine 1960 film is a tale of moral ambivalence and youthful idealism. Set in 1942 Czechoslovakia at a time when the Nazis were occupying the country and the Jews were hounded out of it. Pavel (Ivan Mistrík) falls in love with…

DVD - Eric Rohmer: The Early Works

Eric Rohmer: The Early Works

26 Mar 2007

NEW WAVE The French New Wave debuts of the late 50s that we all know about are Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s 400 Blows, but Eric Rohmer’s too little seen 1959 debut feature, Le Signe Du Lion (Sign of the Lion) is easily their equal.

DVD - Fighting Elegy

Fighting Elegy

26 Mar 2007

ACTION Seijun Tokyo Drifter Suzuki has a deservedly cult reputation as a diverse genre filmmaker. Whether he is directing gangster films, youth movies, or erotica, he constantly works to counter any obviousness in the plotting with the pure bravura…

It's Winter

(12A) 81min

26 Mar 2007

DRAMA The Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz once suggested that all modern Arabic literature (including his own) was ‘fourth or fifth rate’, proposing that non-first world countries, countries which aren’t advanced industrial nations, were generally…

DVD Round-up

28 Feb 2007

Highlights this fortnight include, of course, the very quick turnaround release of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (Fox, 4 stars). As you may have noticed we try not to focus on the really big releases…

Into Great Silence

(U) 169min

12 Feb 2007

DOCUMENTARY Shakespeare’s comment that ‘The silence of pure innocence persuades when speaking fails’ pervades German documentarian Philip Gröning’s film about life inside a silent Carthusian monastic order in France. For Into Great Silence is less of…

Star, The - DVD review

The Star

12 Feb 2007

WAR This is a disappointing Russian WWII film about a team of ‘scouts’ sent on a very risky mission behind German lines to check out the enemy’s equipment and tactics. Selling itself as a film in the tradition of Elem Klimov’s great war film Come and…

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes - DVD review

Avenge But One of My Two Eyes

29 Jan 2007

DOCUMENTARY Avi Mograbi’s tough-minded documentary on the horrors of today’s Israeli-Palestine conflict looks at events not from the point of view of Palestinian fanaticism and Israeli brutality, but chiefly from the long established fanaticism…

Passenger (Pasazerka) - DVD review

Passenger (Pasazerka)

29 Jan 2007

DRAMA Passenger is one of the great, overlooked films to deal with the Holocaust. Andrzej Munk’s film stands alongside Night and Fog and Shoah as a seminal examination of this crater in 20th century life and thought. Unlike those films, however, this…

Heirloom, The - DVD review

The Heirloom

3 Jan 2007

HORROR In this polished haunted house movie, an architect returns from the UK to take up his inheritance: a huge but dilapidated mansion on the outskirts of Taipei. At first his girlfriend and friends can’t get enough of the house, with its high…

Black Sun: The Nankin Massacre - DVD review

Black Sun: The Nankin Massacre

11 Dec 2006

HISTORY/HORROR This is a very weird amalgam of sub-standard video nasty style gore and sanctimonious documentary footage of the Nanking massacre of 1937. The film might have been a genuine exploitation classic, or a horrifically reflective…

Do You Remember Dolly Bell? - DVD review

Do You Remember Dolly Bell?

11 Dec 2006

COMEDY/ROMANCE Emir Kusturica usually works a combination of nostalgia and rumbustiousness, but often the former loses out to the latter and many of his films (like Underground, Black Cat, White Cat) end up like crazy multiple circus acts. Which is…

Ingmar Bergman Collection - DVD review

The Ingmar Bergman Collection

27 Nov 2006

BOX SET For a filmmaker who’s recently denounced Godard as a ‘desperate’ bore, Welles as a ‘phoney’ and Antonioni as someone who never learned his craft, Bergman wouldn’t make much of a critic. But how does he compete with the people he condemns?

KZ

(12) 98min

13 Nov 2006

DOCUMENTARY Filmed over five weeks at the Austrian concentration camp, Mauthausen, documentarian Rex Bloomstein follows tour guides and tourists around the site as visitors discover the drip drip accumulation of the dehumanisation process. As the…

Nun and the Devil, The - DVD review

The Nun and the Devil

13 Nov 2006

HORROR/SOFT CORE PORN The nun movie pretty much became a genre of its own in the 70s, with The Devils, Flavia, Killer Nun and Behind Convent Walls among the ‘nun-sploitation’ movies that got into the habit. The genre’s reputation as a titillating way…

Film books

Screen Stories

26 Oct 2006

David Bordwell’s The Way Hollywood Tells It (University of California Press - 4 stars) is a very impressive look at recent American cinema’s fascination with ‘impact aesthetics’ and intensified continuity. Bordwell, the author of classic film…

The Host

MONSTER MOVIE

26 Oct 2006

When some radioactive substance finds its way into the water supply, and a huge monster fish rises up out of the peaceful waters around Seoul, a local stallholder’s family is all that stands between imminent disasters. This likeable Godzilla-style…

John Pilger - Documentaries That Changed the World

John Pilger - Documentaries That Changed the World

2 Oct 2006

POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY It’s hard not to feel ambivalence towards anyone who insists on partisanship. John Pilger is a case in point. A genuinely crusading print and TV journalist, Pilger has been fighting for the rights of the poor, the put-upon and…

Night Porter, The - DVD review

The Night Porter

18 Sep 2006

DRAMA This notorious 1974 film about a Holocaust survivor who, years later, becomes infatuated with one of the Nazis who terrorised her in the camps was just one of a number that attempted to deal with the after-effects of fascism at the time.

Regular Lovers (Les Amant Reguliers)

(18) 184min

1 Sep 2006

Regular Lovers (Les Amant Reguliers) - Meditation/Romance