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One From The Heart: Reprise. (12A.)
Directed by Francis Coppola. (1982.) Starring Terri Garr, Frederic Forrest, Raul Julia, Nastassja Kinski, Lainie Kazan and Harry Dean Stanton. Out on 4 disc 4k UHD Blu-ray edition or Blu-ray from Studiocanal. 94 mins It's not the setbacks that kill you, it's the successes. Bouncing back from a massive flop is nothing compared to following up an against-all-the-odds hit. (Unless you're James Cameron when it’s your stock in trade.) At the start of the 80s, Francis Ford Coppola was coming off arguably the greatest decade of any Hollywood director ever. He’d directed Godfathers I&II, The Conversation, and won an Oscar for writing Patton. Above all, he’d pulled off Apocalypse Now. The Vietnam epic was his Titanic, the indulgent, over-budget misfire that was supposed to ruin him but turned into a massive hit. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. (15.)
Directed by Philip Kaufman. Starring Donald Sutherland, Brooke Adams, Jeff Goldblum, Veronica Cartwright, Art Hindle and Leonard Nimoy. Out on limited edition 4K UHD Blu-ray/ Blu-ray from Arrow Video with new or original artwork from February 12th. 115 mins. Without a doubt, Arrow Video/ Academy were my chief source of movie-watching pleasure in The Year of Our Lordhelpus 2023, with releases like Naked Lunch, Time Bandits, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Carlito’s Way, and they’ve started ‘24 in fine form with this. As a remake of a classic 50s horror that surpasses the original, Kaufman’s film is up there with John Carpenter’s The Thing. Peeping Tom. (18.)
Directed by Michael Powell. 1960. Starring Karlheinz Böhm, Anna Massey, Moira Shearer, Maxine Audley, Pamela Green and Shirley Anne Field. A 4k restoration available on UHD Blu-ray/ Blu-ray/ DVD from January 29th from Studiocanal. 101 mins. When it was released in 1960, the British critics were brutal. "Beastly," "More nauseating and depressing than the leper colonies of East Pakistan,” “shovel it up and flush it swiftly down the nearest sewer.” And they were right, 100% right. Today we lambast these petty, stuck-up, small-minded Brits for their failure to recognise the visionary darkness of Michael Powell’s slasher movie prototype, cast them as the film equivalent of the Decca executive who turned down The Beatles. Six decades on though their outrage and disgust, and the virulence of its expression, looks like the highest praise the film could possibly have received and the most perceptive analysis. Anything less would have been an insult, a slur. Those reviews are a lot to live up to, but even now Peeping Tom is quite remarkably unpleasant. Bluebeard's Castle. (PG.)
Directed by Michael Powell. 1963 Starring Norman Foster and Ana Raquel Satre. Out on Blu-ray from the BFI. Available on Amazon Prime and iTunes on December 1st. BFI Player 4th December. 62 mins. The opening title card to the Michael Powell-approved subtitled version of this announces “This is an Opera about a curious woman. She is curious about a man. It is sung in German, but don’t let that put you off.” But it kind of does. Even at just over an hour the idea of a two-hander opera sung in German with no subtitles made on a shoestring in a studio set is a daunting proposition, no matter how stunningly impressionistic the visuals are. Honestly, I had to think twice before requesting that review disc. It is though worth the effort. Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai. (15.)
Directed by Jim Jarmusch. 1999 Starring Forest Whitaker, John Tormey, Cliff Gorman, Henry Silva, Isaach De Bankole, Victor Argo and Camille Winbush. A 4k UHD restoration from Studiocanal, out on Steelbook, Blu-ray, DVD & digital on October 23rd. 116 mins Sensing a kindred spirit, I instinctively lean towards any artist, performer or regular human being who appears to be doing the bare minimum and getting away with it. Jim Jarmusch is the premier minimalist of the US indie scene, a master at getting maximum effect from frugal resources. He has been doing the bare minimum for four decades now and has been getting away with it for most of the last two. This Studiocanal Blu-ray release of his last contribution to the twentieth century sees JimJar working at his absolute peak, when his filmmaking consisted of just the right amount of everything, no more and no less. Since this his films have tended towards not quite enough; Ghost Dog was the culmination of a series of sparse, precision miracles. Delicatessen. (15.)
Directed by Marc Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet. 1991 Starring Dominique Pinon, Marie-Laure Dougnac, Jean-Claude Dreyfuss, Karin Viard, Silvie Laguna. Out on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD and Digital on October 16th from Studiocanal. 100 mins The cinema offers up many visions of life after a societal collapsed, often involving S&M fancy dress and pimped-up motors. Few though can be as oddly benign as that of Caro & Jeunet's extraordinary debut, which plays out like a retro post-apocalyptic cannibalistic Jacques Tati farce taking place in a dilapidated boarding house located at the bottom of a barrel of piss. It’s a deadly struggle for survival featuring some despicable and/or demented characters but ultimately the challenging you can say about it is that it’s very French. Targets. (15.)
Directed by Peter Bogdanovich. 1968 Starring Tim O'Kelly, Boris Karloff, Peter Bogdanovich, Nancy Hsueh, Arthur Peterson, Monte Landis and Sandy Baron. Out on Blu-ray from the BFI. 86 mins. In 1968, Boris Karloff had a great career in front of the camera behind him and Peter Bogdanovich was expecting to have a great career behind the camera in front of him. Bogdanovich was just 29, slightly older than his idol, Orson Welles, when he directed, wrote, produced and starred in this, his debut. Like Orson, the bright future didn’t come to pass, but that first film, cobbled together at the behest of legendary cheapskate producer Roger Corman from various odds and ends he had lying around, was an absolute classic: a dazzling meditation on the changing nature of violence in cinema and society, and dirt cheap. When it was made the States were in the throes of social and political turmoil and it must have seemed bold and provocative; 55 years later, it is a revelation. Touch of Evil. (12A.)
Directed by Orson Welles. 1957. Starring Charlton Heston, Janet Leigh, Orson Welles, Joseph Calliea, Akim Tamiroff, Ray Collins and Dennis Weaver. Black and white. Out on a two-disc 4K UHD Limited Edition Box Set with three versions, Reconstruction 110 mins, Theatrical 95 mins, Preview 109 mins. An Orson Welles film can never just be a film. It’ll be a masterpiece, a flawed masterpiece, a masterpiece that was hacked to pieces by the studio, an unfinished masterpiece or an unmade masterpiece. The three versions of the 1957 thriller Touch of Evil on this two-disc 4K UHD release range from flawed to hacked to pieces by the studio. All three cuts – The Reconstruction, Preview, Theatrical – offer up, to varying degrees and lengths, a seedy little potboiler of murder and corruption that doesn't quite reach gripping, a really decent film noir full of imaginative touches. The degree to which these creative flourishes elevate the film above its pulp roots is a matter of personal choice. Nobody would call it a masterpiece, but this being Welles, loads of people do. Gregory's Girl. (12.)
Directed by Bill Forsyth. 1980. Starring John Gordon Sinclair, Dee Hepburn, Claire Grogan, Robert Buchanan, Jake D'Arcy, Alec Norton and Chic Murray. Out on UHD, Blu-ray, iTunes and Amazon Prime from the BFI September 11th. 91 mins. 4K UHD https://shop.bfi.org.uk/pre-order-gregory-s-girl-4k-uhd.html As any teacher worth his chalk will tell you, life isn’t fair. But life has nothing on the movies, which are just unfair to the point of being totally random. The movies take the talent and dreams of those who just want to make good films, churn them up and spit them out. To succeed you need to be cunning, crafty, self-disciplined and very talented and in most cases even that will not be enough. Being a film director and having a long and successful career is such a matter of luck that we should probably just be grateful for the few that fate favours and not linger too much on the ones that get cast to the wayside. Perhaps, but I just wish that capricious unjust fate could've looked more kindly on Bill Forsyth. If I were given the choice by the great god of cinema to save either him or Orson, I’d leave Welles to a life of poncing free meals from Eurotrash aristos and landing them with unfinished films in return, and give Forsyth another two decades of active film making. 3 Ages. (U.)
Directed by Buster Keaton and Edward F. Cline. 1923. Starring Buster Keaton, Margaret Leahy, Wallace Beery, Lillian Lawrence and Joe Roberts. Out on Blu-ray from Eureka! Masters of Cinema on August 21st. Black and white, silent. 70 mins. It's taken a few years but Eureka's Masters of Cinema completes its collection of classic Keaton films with his first feature, the original History of The World, Part 1. For his jump from two-reel shorts (around 20 minutes) to full-length feature, Keaton came up with a project that was simultaneously incredibly bold, uncharacteristically cautious. He would film the same love triangle tale - him battling with brute Beery for the affections of Leahy against the objections of her parents Lawrence and Roberts - in the Stone Age, in Roman times and the present day. It's an original, unique, risky concept, but if it didn't work he could always cut it into three separate shorts. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. (18.)
Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1998. Starring Johnny Depp, Benicio Del Toro, Tobey Maguire, Craig Bierko, Mark Harmon, Cameron Diaz, Gary Busey, Christina Ricci and Ellen Barkin. Out on UHD 4K Blu-ray from Arrow Video on May 22nd. 118 mins. It’s a depressing thought but by some accounting methods, this late 90s adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson’s classic novel is Terry Gilliam’s last good film. Personally, I cherish 2009’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, which saw Gilliam brushing himself down after a decade of setbacks and going back to the things that made him special in the first place. But if Parnassus doesn’t work for you, the 21st century has nothing else to offer. It began with Gilliam taking his turn to get shafted by Harvey Weinstein on The Brothers Grimm, then moved onto the dark and ugly downer that was Tideland, the misfire of Zero Theorum and the underwhelming realisation of his long-planned Don Quixote project. Still, if this is his last great film, then it is a hell of a creative splurge. Repulsion. (15.)
Directed by Roman Polanski. 1964. Starring Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, John Fraser, Yvonne Furneaux, Patrick Wymark and Helen Fraser. Out on Blu-ray/ DVD from The Criterion Collection on May 22nd. Black and white. 105 mins. “People called Roman, they go the house.*” It’s not one of the most celebrated lines from Life Of Brian – Roman centurion Cleese says it to Brian castigating him at swordpoint for the errors in his Latin graffiti – but, misremembered, it’s stuck in my head. And it always seems to be particularly relevant whenever the subject of eloping Franco-Polish paedophile film director Roman Polanski comes up. Now, I’m not going to be getting on my high horse about Polanski – if I was, I wouldn’t have badgered the Criterion PRs for a review disc – but I have to take an issue with the tone of some of his defenders. The 2009 petition, signed by 160 prominent members of the film industry, demanding the Swiss authorities refuse an extradition request from the States over his rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977 included the line about not turning, “this ingenious filmmaker into a martyr of a politico-legal imbroglio.” And I have to ask, has it been established that being a great genius of cinema superseded being a convicted paedophile and alleged rapist? And if it has, when was it decided that Polanski made the cut? Because if you look at his credits there's a lot of rubbish there: Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby are very more exceptions than the rule. And yet, if you go back to his early films, before Manson and Hollywood, particularly Repulsion you can see something resembling genius. Naked Lunch. (18.)
Directed by David Cronenberg. 1991. Starring Peter Weller, Judy Davis, Ian Holm, Julian Sands and Roy Scheider. Out on limited edition 4K UHD from Arrow Video on April 17th. 115 mins. David Cronenberg has carved out this fantastic niche in cinema culture as a straitlaced degenerate. His films affront common decency but with a cool calm precision; he doesn’t get worked up about it. In the early nineties, he chose to apply himself to the filming of unfilmable books. Five years later his version of J.G. Ballard’s Crash would be, in my opinion, the greatest and most authentic literary adaption ever; his version of William S. Burrough’s defining work could be argued to be among the least. Cronenberg took one of the wildest books in the canon and tamed it; Burroughs’ streams of the unconscionable were straightened out and laid out in an orderly fashion. Cronenberg effectively de-queered Naked Lunch. You could call it a travesty or maybe you could appreciate it as the literary equivalent of alternative facts. Anyway, why shouldn’t uptight, straight people have their own Naked Lunch? The City of Lost Children. (15.)
Directed by Marco Caro & Jean-Pierre Jeunet Starring Ron Perlman, Daniel Emilfork, Judith Vittet, Dominque Pinon, Jean-Claude Dreyfus. In French with subtitles. Out on 4K UHD, Blu-ray, DVD and Digital April 3rd from Studiocanal. 112 mins. Caro and Jeunet’s magnificent folly is a rhapsody in green, yellow and red, but mostly green. After the success of their small-budget post-apocalyptic cannibal hostelry comedy/drama Delicatessen, the visionary alliance of Caro and Jeunet had a little window of opportunity, a moment when producers were prepared to throw money at them. And they caught it, all 18 million euros of it, and ran with it to hide away in the 4,000 square-metre Arpajon Studio for six months making a children’s film that was unfit for children, a children’s film upon which no natural light will fall. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (PG.)
Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1988. Starring John Neville, Sarah Polley, Eric Idle, Jonathan Pryce, Uma Thurman, Oliver Reed and Robin Williams. Out on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. 121 mins. To quote Oscar Wilde, “The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.” Scarred but triumphant (sort of) after the battles with the studio over Brazil, Terry Gilliam decided to spin the wheel again, venturing off to Rome’s Cinecitta studio to make a thrilling adventure fantasy film about the famous liar. The result is one of the great pre-seegeeye spectacles: wild and opulent; joyously silly but just sombre enough to give it a bit of an edge. And what does everyone remember about it? It went wildly over budget and was a flop. Which it did, but what is that your business? It wasn’t your bloody money it lost. Now, at least, this brilliant Baron gets a modicum of justice through this tremendous Criterion double-disc Blu-ray release (triple, if you want a 4K UHD disc as well) which lets you revel in the wonders of the film and marvel at the chaos of its creation. The Draughtsman's Contract. (15.)
Directed by Peter Greenaway. 1982. Starring Anthony Higgins, Janet Suzman, Anne Louise Lambert, Neil Cunningham and Hugh Fraser. 107 mins. In cinemas from November 11th. Part of the BFI’s Frames of Mind: The Films of Peter Greenaway season throughout November and December. https://www.bfi.org.uk/framesofmind Out on Blu-ray from the BFI on November 14th. https://shop.bfi.org.uk/the-draughtsmans-contract-blu-ray.html Not before time, the BFI has gotten around to doing a full retrospective of the films of Britain's greatest living filmmaker, Peter Greenaway. His work is cold, difficult, priggish, precious, maddeningly contrary, parched and not-for-the-likes-of-you elitist, though no more so than Jean-Luc Godard and you all went into a tizzy when he died in September. Like Godard, Greenaway is capable of subjecting audiences to the most unutterable tedium (though, as a percentage, much less so than JLG) but when he hits on something, when he is on it, he sees possibilities that no other filmmaker does. Of course, that doesn’t stop one wishing he wasn’t such an anally retentive, stick-in-the-mud, but there you go. Lost Highway. (18.)
Directed by David Lynch. 1997. Starring Patricia Arquette, Bill Pullman, Balthazar Getty, Robert Loggia, Gary Busey, Natasha Gregson Wagner, Richard Pryor, Jack Nance and Robert Blake. Out on Blu-ray from Criterion Collection on October 31st. Lost Highway is David Lynch’s lost masterpiece. It’s perhaps not quite on a par with Eraserhead, Blue Velvet or the third season of Twin Peaks but it’s damn close. That it resides in comparative obscurity astounds me more with each viewing. To some degree, I guess this is due to it being made in the nineties when Lynch was suffering a critical backlash after the popular success, initially, of the TV show Twin Peaks and the Cannes triumphs of Wild At Heart. But, the film he made before this, Twin Peaks Fire Walk With Me, has been the subject of a sweeping critical re-evaluation (actually a critical U-turn) after its hostile reception. So why not this? It’d be a much more worthy recipient. How can Mulholland Drive be held up as his best film when it’s, to some degree, just an inferior remake of this? Lost Highway is inscrutable and perplexing, compelling and seductive, crazy sexy and that bit nastier than his usual. |
Carlito's Way. (18.)
Directed by Brian De Palma. 1993. Starring Al Pacino, Sean Penn, Penelope Ann Miller, John Leguizamo, Luis Guzman, James Rebhorn and Viggo Mortensen. Out on 4k UHD Blu-ray from Arrow Video on September 25th. 144 mins. Though it isn’t usually what he is associated with, only Scorsese and Coppola place above Brian De Palma as makers of modern American gangster films. Carlito’s Way, in which Puerto Rican smack dealer Pacino is returned to the streets of 70’s New York after 5 years in the slammer and attempts to go straight, is the third and last of his big-budget gangster epic. The first was Scarface, the realistic silly one; Next was The Untouchables, the straitlaced, comic book silly one with the subversive learn-the-lessons of prohibition subtext and finally came Carlito’s Way, the soppy silly one. Carlito’s Way is pure man weepie, so cliché-ridden and corny you can't believe intelligent grown men would bother making it but done with such brazen shamelessness that any grown man of a matching disposition can't help but love it. Partie De Campagne. (PG.)
Directed by Jean Renoir. 1936. Starring Sylvia Bataille, Georges Saint-Saens, Jeanne Marken, Gabriello, Jacques Borel, Paul Temps, Gabrielle Fontan, Jean Renoir, Marguerite Renoir. Black and white. Out now on Blu-ray from the BFI. 41 mins. The process of filmmaking has a habit of taking light-hearted, just-a-bit-of-fun notions and turning them into joyless chores. The idea behind Partie De Campagne was for Renoir and some mates to spend nine days in the French countryside making a short film adaptation of Guy De Maupassant’s short story. But the glories of the great French summer blew through with one of the wettest summers on record and turned the jolly japes of their week away into a rain-drenched drag that went on for a month and a half. Tim Bandits. (PG.)
Directed by Terry Gilliam. 1981. Starring Craig Warnock, David Rappaport, Kenny Baker, Malcolm Dixon, Tiny Ross, Mike Edmonds, Jack Purvis and David Warner; plus Sean Connery, John Cleese, Shelley Duvall, Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Michael Palin, Peter Vaughan, Jim Broadbent and Ralph Richardson. Out on 4K UHD Blu-ray from Arrow Video on August 21st. 116 mins. Time Bandits was Terry Gilliam’s first film – well, apart from the one he did before it (Jabberwocky) and the two Python films he helped out on. This though is the one where we first see the distinctive Gilliam style. Though there is a Cleese cameo, as Robin Hood, and it was co-written by Palin, Bandits is the moment he leaves Monty behind. It was a big deal when it came out, an unexpected hit that was the first real indication that Gilliam could become a major filmmaker. In the subsequent decades though it has been overshadowed by Gilliam's various triumphs and disasters and if I'm honest, I didn't have particularly high hopes for it. But, it really is quite wonderful. The Kid. (15.)
Directed by Charlie Chaplin. 1921. Starring Charlie Chaplin, Jackie Coogan, Edna Purviance, Chuck Reisner, Lite Grey and Carl Miller. Available on Blu-ray and DVD from The Criterion Collection. Black and white. 53 mins. The Kid is a Chaplin film you think you know without seeing. It’s his first feature film, the soppy one with the famous blub-fest final scene where the kid (Coogan) that the little tramp found as a baby and raised himself, is carted off by the authorities. Except that’s not the final scene and the film is not quite as soppy as you’d expect it to be. La Regle Du Jeu. (PG.)
Directed by Jean Renoir. 1938. Starring Nora Gregor, Paulette Dubost, Mila Parely, Marcel Dalio, Julien Carette, Roland Toutain, Gaston Modot and Jean Renoir. A 4K restoration out now on Blu-ray and DVD from the BFI. Black and white. 107 mins. At the start of 1939, Jean Renoir embarked on the making of what would come to be his most celebrated film, The Rules of the Game, a portrait of the French upper classes carrying on with their indolent lifestyle and trivial romantic duplicities, even though the world was on the brink of war. What could be more indulgent and short-sighted? Well, maybe making a film about the French upper class carrying on with their indolent lifestyle and trivial romantic duplicities at the start of 1939 when the world was on the brink of war. Surely, it was a little bit too late in the day to be pointing this out. Moreover, however scathing his satirical insights were, they kind of pale beside Nazi Occupation. What’s the point in articulating the failings of a class of people who are about to be wiped out anyway, and wiped away by something far worse? Mystery Train. (15.)
Directed by Jim Jarmusch. 1988. Starring Masatoshi Nagase, Yuki Kudo, Joe Strummer, Steve Buscemi, Ricky Aviles, Nicholetta Braschi, Elisabeth Bracco, Cinque Lee and Screaming Jay Hawkins. Out on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection. 110 mins. I was struck recently by a notion that Jim Jarmusch and Quentin Tarantino, two directors who might appear to be polar opposites, a wise old owl and an ADHD kid, are actually remarkably similar. They both like talk. Either, filming characters talking or cameoing in other people’s film delivering a little spiel. (JimJar in Blue In The Face, QT in Sleep With Me.) They both love Lee Marvin. They are both enthralled by concepts of Cool (though only JimJar can pull it off in person.) And both of them did their best work in the last century which I think makes Mystery Train, three unrelated stories that connect together, his Pulp Fiction. Three Colours Trilogy. (15.)
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski. Trois Couleurs: Bleu. 1993. Starring Juliette Binoche, Benoît Régent, Florence Pernel. 98 mins Trois Couleurs: Blanc. 1994. Starring Zbigniew Zamachowski, Julie Delpy, Janusz Gajos. 92 mins Trois Couleurs: Rouge. 1994. Starring Irene Jacobs, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Fredderique Feder. 99 mins. Their brows may be high but the august denizens of the film criticism arthouse are as fickle as teenage boy band fans. In the late eighties/ early nineties, Polish auteur Krzysztof Kieślowski was quite the Harry Styles. His ten-part TV drama Dekalog, each hour-long episode devoted to one of the ten commandments, was up there with Das Boot and Heimat as a must-see foreign languages series. Two of those were spun out into features, A Short Film About Love and A Short Film About Killing, They were followed by the terrific Double Life of Veronique in 1991 before his landmark Three Colours trilogy. When he died in 1996, he was held to be one of the world’s greatest filmmakers; in the recent Sight and Sound poll none of his films made the top 250.* The Last Emperor. (15.)
Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci Starring John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Vivien Wu and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Available from Arrow Video on 4k Ultra HD or standard Blu-ray. Two-disc edition: theatrical cut and extended, 163/ 219 mins. While the 1970s was a golden age for the Oscars with Godfathers, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, and Annie Hall among those lauded, the 1980s would be a terrible decade for Best Film Oscar winners. It began with Robert Redford’s largely forgotten Ordinary People, concluded with a victory for Driving Miss Daisy and somewhere between managed to give the top prize to Terms of Endurement. It was the decade which saw the emergence of the Oscar Pleader, long-winded historical epics based on books or true stories; films like Ghandi, Out Of Africa and Amadeus. These painfully prestigeous productions would clean sweep the technical prizes before winning the top award. Ingmar Bergman. Vol 4. (18.)
Cries and Whispers (1972.)/ Scenes from a Marriage (1974) 159 mins/ Autumn Sonata (1978) 92 mins/ From the Life of Marionettes. (1980) 103 mins./ Fanny and Alexander, feature film version or 4-part TV series (1982.) 188mins, 339 mins. /After the Rehearsal (1984) 73mins. https://shop.bfi.org.uk/ingmar-bergman-volume-4-blu-ray-box-set.html The concluding volume of the BFI's Bergman collection takes us through his last decade of filmmaking and introduces us to two daring new elements – colour and the telly. He’d made films in colour before but in Volume 3 only 1964’s All These Women broke the dominance of monochrome. It’s all colour here, opening with the abrasive primary assault of Cries and Whispers and moving to the more muted palette of Autumn Sonata and Scenes from a Marriage. Most of the films here were made for TV and Scenes is one of two entries that were series. This collection gives us only the sub-three-hour cinema cut rather than the almost five hours of the TV version. For Fanny and Alexander, we get both the theatrical film version and the full four-episode TV series. Ingmar Bergman Volume 3 (15.)
The Devil's Eye (1960)/ Virgin Spring (1960)/ Through a Glass Darkly (1961)/ The Silence (1963) Winter Light (1963)/ All These Women. (1964)/ Persona (1966)/ The Rite (1968.). A five-disc Blu-ray box set from the BFI. The BFI four-volume Bergman selection arrives in the swinging sixties, at which point Ingmar decides to put away the lighthearted fripperies of films like The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, stop messing about and really get serious. The BFI is choosing to release this in the early autumn but surely the winter would be more appropriate; attempting to watch Through A Glass Darkly in the afternoon I kept having to adjust the curtains to try and repel any chink of light. These are mediation on darkness that brook no levity. Persona and the Faith trilogy - Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence - are the films that really put the -esque into Bergman. The Big Chill. (15.)
Directed by Lawrence Kasdan Starring Tom Berenger, Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum, William Hurt, Kevin Kline, Mary Kay Place, Meg Tilly and JoBeth Williams. Out on Blu-ray from The Criterion Collection. 101 mins. Back in February, I was listening to Paul Gambaccini’s Pick of the Pops on Radio 2. He had alighted on the corresponding Top 20 from that week in 1969, which included both I Heard It Through The Grapevine by Marvin Gaye and Wichita Lineman by Glen Campbell, surely two of the greatest ‘45s in American pop history. And alongside them were For Once In My Life by Stevie Wonder, Albatross by Fleetwood Mac, You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling by The Righteous Brothers and Dancing In The Streets by Martha and the Vandellas. An amazing selection of classics for a single week, but sprinkled among those were some crackers from Diana Ross and The Supremes, Sam and Dave, Dean Martin, Nina Simone and The Isley Brothers. And by listing those I’m turning my nose up at tracks by Amen Corner, Move, Engelbert Humperdinck and Cilla Black, as well as that week’s No 1, Where Do You Go To My Lovely by Peter Sarstedt. There are whole subsequent decades that couldn’t match the output of that one week in the Sixties. Which I think shows that the proposition put forward by Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill that we have lost something since the Sixties, isn’t entirely idle nostalgia. Pickpocket. (PG.)
Directed by Robert Bresson. 1959 Starring Martin La Salle, Marika Green, Dolly Scal, Jean Pelegri, Kassagi and Pierre Leymarie. Black and white. Out now on Blu-ray from the BFI. 76 mins. What one so admires in Bresson is the intense rigour and discipline which he applied to his filmmaking; the thoroughness with which he sucked the joy out of cinema. This film, among his most celebrated, opens with the line, “This is not a thriller,” lest any viewer was getting their hopes up. The film is true to its word, but just to make sure the written prologue then goes on to give away the entire plot, including its ending. Oh Oui, ce n’est pas un thriller. Enter the Void. (18.)
Directed by Gasper Noe. 2009. Starring Nathaniel Brown, Paz de la Huerta, Cyril Roy, Olly Alexander, Masato Tanno and Sara Stockbridge. Out on Blu-ray from Arrow Video. Director’s Cut. 154 mins. UK theatrical cut. 137 mins. This was my third time around with Noe's should've-been-masterpiece, a hallucinogenic swirl of life, death, love, pain and the meaning of existence fuelled by drugs, squalor and sex, set in a toytown Tokyo, and I still can’t get it to fly for me. The start of the film always gets you, thrilling you with its formal daring but the world of possibilities it throws open soon close up into the same old, same old. Most of your initial enthusiasm will likely have been used up by the halfway point. Lux Aeterna. (15.)
Directed by Gasper Noe. Starring Béatrice Dalle, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Abbey Lee, Karl Glusman. Out on Blu-ray from Arrow Video. 51 mins. It’s difficult to pin down what exactly Gasper Noe’s half-length film is. It’s a little bit Me Too, a little bit meta examination of cinema, a little bit backstage film set drama and a study of the history of the demonisation of women through accusations of witchcraft. More than anything though it is an upping of Noe's ongoing assault on people with epilepsy. It begins with a quote from Dostoevsky on how he envies the epileptic the moment before they have a fit and culminates with an extended sequence featuring strobe lighting and throbbing sound effects. Most of his films have at least one of these sequences but the final one in this film is so prolonged, so intensive that it is almost like an audience interrogation, a thinning of the herd, trying to weed out any hidden epileptic tendencies in the viewers. Naked. (18.)
Directed by Mike Leigh. 1993. Starring David Thewlis, Lesley Sharp, Katrin Cartlidge, Peter Wight, Claire Skinner, Greg Cruttwell, Gina McKee and Ewen Bremner. Out on Blu-ray from the BFI. Also in cinemas as part of a BFI Mike Leigh retrospective. 131 mins. Down in that London, nobody talks to you. Well, not since Naked they don't. During its 131 minutes various Londoners, or itinerant inhabitants thereof, strike up conversations with young Johnny (Thewlis), down from Manchester in a stolen car to avoid a beating, and soon come to regret it. Johnny is garrulous, well-read, highly educated, sarky and believes that humanity is inherently flawed and that the world will end in 1999. He's living proff of how a lot of learning and a little bible will mess you up. He constantly berates southerners for their coldness but turns on anyone who does show him kindness. The Thin Red Line. (15.)
Directed by Terrence Malick. 1998 Starring Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplin, Adrien Brody, Elias Koteas, Sean Penn, Nick Nolte, Dash Mihok, Woody Harrelson, John Cusack, George Clooney, Tim Blake Nelson, Jared Leto, John Savage, John C. Reilly and John Travolta. Out now on Blu-ray from Criterion Collection. 164 mins. Though Badlands is his masterpiece, a flawless work of art conveying complex and profound ideas, this is the one, the Malick film to be cherished above all others, the one that justifies his genius tag, the one that keeps us holding out for him even after all the crappy films he's subjected us to over the last decade. The world is not short of war films but this and Apocalypse Now stand above them all. It's not so much that they are better than all the others, rather that they reach something beyond all the others. Coppola found in Vietnam and Conrad an intoxicating madness; in his version of James Jones account of the battle for Guadalcanal in World War 2 Malick concocted a vision of war as hell, and heaven. Get Carter. (18.)
Directed by Mike Hodges. 1971. Starring Michael Caine, Ian Hendry, Bryan Mosley, Alun Armstrong, Britt Ekland, George Sewell, Tony Beckley, Rosemarie Dunham, Geraldine Moffat, Bernard Hepton, Terence Rigby, Glynn Edwards and John Osborne. A new 4K restoration. Out on 4K Ultra UHD and Blu-ray from the BFI on August 1st.112 mins. UHD: https://shop.bfi.org.uk/get-carter-4k-ultra-hd-edition.html Blu-ray: https://shop.bfi.org.uk/get-carter-blu-ray.html The similarity between myself and the film Get Carter is that more than five decades have passed since our creation, but we both improve with each passing year. There are very few films that always seem to find new ways to impress you with each viewing but every time I’m caught a little off guard by how great this is. When it first came out, this tale of a London gangster (Caine) going up to Newcastle to investigate the death of his brother was seen as excessively nasty, even grubby, with its relentlessly bleak and cynical view of human motivation. Now, this exercise in taking a coal-black sensibility to Newcastle stands as a genuine classic of British cinema; this nation’s saving grace. Hearts and Minds. (15.)
Directed by Peter Davis. Featuring Daniel Ellsberg, Georges Bidault, George Coker, Charles Clifford, Khanh Nguyen, Robert Muller, J. W. Fulbright, Randy Floyd, William C. Westmoreland, Walt Rostow. Out on Blu-ray from the Criterion Collection on September 26th. 112 mins. This astonishingly good documentary is that rarity, a Vietnam film made during the war. It’s Vietnam before the fall. During the two years that Davis and his team were compiling and assembling the footage, President Nixon was deescalating American involvement but the war was very much ongoing. When producer Bert Schneider went up in his white tuxedo to collect the Oscar for Best Documentary at the 1975 Oscars and delivered a message of peace from the North Vietnamese ambassador, the fall of Saigon was still three weeks away. |
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