Film
theartsdesk
This month's DVD release round-up includes Me and Orson Welles, classic TV series from now (Mad Men 3) and then (Callan) and two sorts of English childhood, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll and The Railway Children. A Czech gem from the 1960s makes it onto DVD, Bruce Lee's life is documented, and recent releases Avatar, Nowhere Boy, The Kreutzer Sonata, Sherlock Holmes, Mugabe and the White African, The Road, Nightwatching and The Limits of Control hit the shelves. Our reviewers are Anne Billson, Tom Birchenough, Fisun Güner, Sheila Johnston, Veronica Lee, Jasper Rees and Adam Sweeting. Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There was a celebrated two-word come-on to 1930s movie-goers. “Garbo Laughs!” was a poster strapline calculated to seduce fans of the mournful Swedish star to Ninotchka, in which her character had an unwonted fit of the giggles. Audiences were rather more conflicted when another cinematic embargo was ended. In The Great Dictator, Chaplin talks.He took his time: 1940 was 13 years after The Jazz Singer. The greatest star of the silent age chose to stick with what he knew, and cast Luddite aspersions on the new-fangled talkies. It was the rise of Nazism which persuaded him to succumb fully to Read more ...
sheila.johnston
Rainer Werner Fassbinder lived fast, died young and left an awful-looking corpse, in 1982, at the age of 37. But not before writing, directing and producing dozens of movies, as well as plays, television series and the odd radio drama or book. Nonetheless, somehow, in between the endless chain of great subversive melodramas that made his name internationally in the mid-1970s, the director found time for this delirious, two-part conspiracy thriller. Rarely seen, long unavailable, it's a visionary acid trip through a not-far-off dystopia, a revelation for fans both of sci-fi/ fantasy and of Read more ...
David Nice
At long last it's here on DVD: the greatest Bergman movie the master didn't make, though he wrote the most meticulously detailed, 300-page screenplay-cum-novel (which covers all the events of the four-part Swedish TV miniseries rather than the much shorter feature film we have here). Naturally, too, he approved a luminous performance by Pernilla August who, under her maiden name of Östergren, frolicked as red-headed maid Maj in the film many love best, Fanny and Alexander, and who as the wife of Bille August, the very distinguished award-winning director of The Best Intentions, rose to Read more ...
fisun.guner
When Rembrandt painted his 1642 masterpiece The Night Watch, he must have expected to live out his days in the style befitting a great artist. Yet he was soon to face financial ruin. In attempting to understand why, Peter Greenaway and has come up with a speculative tale involving a convoluted plot to ruin Rembrandt’s reputation by those he had painted. Greenaway recreates a visual experience akin to a Rembrandt painting, and Martin Freeman puts in a solid performance as the artist in sweary, pugnacious mode. There’s an uncanny resemblance, too. But even for a conspiracy thriller as arty Read more ...
sheila.johnston
A field of sunflowers hang their heads, as though in shame or sorrow, to the deep thrum of a single chord in the film's opening shot, at once beautiful and threatening. But that is about the only breath of fresh air in the whole of the movie. Set on the first day of the 1982 Lebanon War, it proceeds for the rest of its duration to trap us, along with four terrified young Israeli soldiers, inside the confines of their tank, a monstrous apparition fetid with stale cigarette smoke, sweat and blood and a fifth character in its own right.It sounds like the recipe for a stage play, even a Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
"Change" has been the watchword of the past few months, the standard flown hopefully aloft by every political party. A week spent anxiously waiting for a political conclusion, worrying about its impact, and heatedly debating its validity has made for a more than usually vulnerable sense of British nationhood: an apt time indeed for the UK release of Triomf, a brutal South African parable about political prejudice, social intolerance, and above all the fear of the new.Set in the days leading up to South Africa’s first free elections of 1994, Michael Raeburn’s film yokes the story of a nation’s Read more ...
william.ward
Applauded by the audiences at Cannes last year, where it was the only Italian film in the competition, and nominated for a Palme d’Or, awarded four prizes at the Chicago International Film Festival, and favourably received at home, Marco Bellocchio’s Vincere is now being released in the UK, increasingly a rare event for films of Italian origin.And not without good reason: the flair of originality combined with an attention to the quality of the dialogue, the acting and the entire editing process is a skill set not often encountered these last 30 years in Italian cinema. It is often said Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Filippo Timi plays the young Mussolini of Marco Bellocchio's Vincere as a glowering, virile force of nature. Watching this and his other recent films, it was hard not to think of the Brando of the early 1950s. Timi, too, combines bullish masculine power and delicate sensitivity - he's combustible and magnetic. I was still more sure he was someone special when Gabriele Salvatores, who directed him in As God Commands, mentioned that Timi has a terrible stammer and eyesight so bad he's "almost blind. He can't see and can't speak - the two things an actor needs most," Salvatores said. "But he has Read more ...
sheila.johnston
There's a fabulous movie about Robin Hood opening today. Step forward Gianluigi Toccafondo, whose luminescent five-minute Rotoscope animated version of the myth is an impressionistic, utterly original blender-mix of Chagall, Bacon and Munch. The only snag is that, to catch it, you do first have to sit through a 140-minute live-action curtain-raiser, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Russell Crowe - an Oscar-winning actor who's here as wooden and broad in the beam as a Sherwood oak. At 46, he's also a bit long in the tooth to be starring in a film that bills itself as about the beginning Read more ...
Veronica Lee
If I had a fiver for every time I have heard a comic described (usually by the comic himself) as “the new Bill Hicks”, I would be rather comfortably off. It’s tosh, of course, and, as his brother astutely says in American: The Bill Hicks Story, only Bill Hicks could be Bill Hicks, because what you saw on the outside was what was on the inside. Hicks himself is in no position to argue either way: he died, aged 32, from pancreatic cancer in 1994. Those who die at the height of their powers are usually conferred icon status; some deserve it; many do not. On balance, Hicks almost certainly does, Read more ...
josh.spero
In my parents’ day, apparently, one just turned up at the cinema whenever one felt like it, even if that meant the first thing you heard on entering the auditorium was Bogart signalling the start of a beautiful friendship. That doesn’t wash these days – the auteur put paid to that – and given the short films commissioned by ICO/LUX to run before the feature, we can only approve. ICO, which supports independent film in the UK, and LUX, an agency for artists who work with film, asked eight international artists to make five-minute films, the results of which are being premiered at Cannes Read more ...