My Favorite Movies

There is a character in 'Amores perros' who looks like Karl Marx. He is a tramp and an assassin, a good bourgeois who one day, Reggie Perrin-like, abandoned his family, and, un-Reggie Perrin-like, joined the Sandanistas in an effort to create a better world, earning 20 years in prison for his troubles. Walking the streets with a creaky cart and a gaggle of mangy dogs, he was found by the policeman who jailed him, who gave him a dingy place to live, food, and the odd, non-official contract.

El Chivo is the soul of the film, the missing link, both in appearance (a man called 'The Goat', who has rejected the civilities of society and lives a beast-like existence with his dogs, amongst the ruins of civilisation), and narrative function. With intricate structure, 'Amores perros' tells three stories, one of underclass Mexican life, where survival depends on what New Labour calls 'illegal economies' (dog-fighting, bank-robbing etc.), where bright young women are stifled and degraded by thoughtless pregnancies and brutal marriages, where single mothers depend (and usually can't depend) on shiftless sons for subsistence; and this world's mirror opposite, the world of the media, of celebrity, of models and magazine editors, of daytime TV, perfume advertising campaigns and bright apartments. Family life is central here too, although in this case it is torn apart by more pleasanntly bourgeois ailments like ennui and dissatisfaction.

These two stories are mediated by the narrative of El Chivo, the man who left one of these worlds for the other, but who still negotiates the two, through his search for the daughter he left as a toddler, and in his 'job', wiping out businessman. If Mexico is emerging as part of the super-confident globalism of high-capitalism, than El Chivo is the grizzly sore thumb, the ex-Sandinista, the Marx lookalike, the man who said no, the drop-out, the forgotten, the depleted spirit of the Left, happily killing and torturing the servants of the new economic regime.

There is something Biblical about his hirsute ascetism too, presuming to judge the 'Cain and Abel' half-brothers, one an adulterer, the other with a contract out on his sibling, another example of family gone badly wrong. This, the bleak funeral and grave scenes, and Octavia's functional crossing himself every time he passes an icon on the landing, are the sole residual elements of religion in a society once ostentatiously religious.

Except for the director. Like Paul Thomas Anderson in 'Magnolia', although to a less self-conscious degree, Gonzales Inarritu is the God of his film, intricately creating the structure that links his characters and their different environments. These are negative connections, however, which work against the idea of coherent meaning in life - contact usually results in destruction (physical, material, spiritual), or diminishing.

He is also an Old Testament god, punishing those who would get too confident with their future plans or their seemingly inviolable present success - the gains of capitalism are prey to the violent whims of chance: Gonzalez Inarritu doesn't need frogs to shake a rigid society or mindset.

Moral change is linked to physical change - being beaten up, losing a leg, cutting hair. The punning title, with its reference to the dog-eat/fight-dog nature of modern life, and its general unsatisfactoriness, also gives the film its Biblical feel, the idea of Mexico as an asphalt desert, or a rubbish heap, with all these scrawny mutts scavenging the remains.

'Amores perros' shares the sickly, bleached near-monochrome look of many recent crime films, like 'Chopper' or 'Bleeder'. But where the heightened mise-en-scene in those works were expressionistic projections of their protagonists' psychosis, here it's part of a controlling world-view, the universal consciousness that creates, connects and destroys.

The three stories, though connected narratively and symbolically, are mutually distinct - the first is an exhilirating mix of violent gangster film and frustrated romance; the second is like a short story (the screenwriter is a novelist), a figurative plot where movement is through image, symbol and idea, rather than film narrative; the third is a kind of spiritual journey, with an appropriately Biblical (or Wim Wenders-like) openness.

'Amores perros' is not quite as amazing as its admirers claim - it says more about contemporary cinema that a film only has to hold your interest for it to be a masterpiece - but it is consistently enthralling, and, despite all the stylistic tics and brutal violence, bracingly humanist.

In Times of dictatorship,two boys from opposite classes make friendship.Like the young heroes of of Louis Malle's "Lacombe, Lucien" (1974) and "Au revoir les enfants"(1987), Gonzalo Infante (Mateas Quer), the protagonist of Chilean director Andrés Wood's coming of age story "Machuca," has to grow up in a time of political upheavals and physical dangers -- though he's not as vulnerable to them as some of his campañeros. For Gonzalo and his friend Pedro it's not the Nazi occupation of France but the CIA-sponsored coup against Salvador Allende that ultimately separates him from his at-risk young friend.

The relevance of the events of September 11, 1973 that "Machuca" leads up to is clear to anyone who looks at what has been happening in Carlos Chavez's Venezuela. The CIA and the rich of the country may not have been able to bring Chavez down, but not for lack of trying. And the formerly government-pampered classes are as vicious in their hostility and as willing to eliminate Chavez as the same classes were in Chile at the time of Allende. The difference may be that Chavez has brought more real socialism to the country and thus has only strengthened his huge popular base among the poor majority.

In Wood's film, Gonzalo becomes friends with Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna) when the pro-leftist headmaster of his "English" private school, Father McEnroe (Ernesto Malbran), arranges to have poor children brought into his class as charity students. "Machuca" describes an uneasy mutual attraction of rich and poor at a crucial moment in Chilean history: Gonzalo helps Pedro with his English, lends him his expensive hardbound Lone Ranger comic books, and brings him to his posh home. And in return Pedro defends Gonzalo on the frequent occasions when he's bullied by other boys and introduces him to the new world of his family and his shantytown life.

Some of the contrasts are a little obvious, with greater warmth on the poor boy's side and more coolness on Gonzalo's (he has a mother who's adulterous and a father who's often absent), but much of the story is simple coming of age stuff. In fact the filmmaker may lose touch with the political story at times, though he constantly shows revolutionary slogans on walls and huge demonstrations of both left and right, which Gonzalo attends selling flags with Pedro and Pedro's cousin Silvana. Silvana is more critical of Ganzalo than his pal Pedro, but she kisses them both in return for rationed cans of condensed milk.

Class politics comes to the school in a vociferous meeting where many call for the ouster of the poor students and the leftist headmaster with them.

All this is interesting enough, but would be nothing without the coup that is coming. When that happens, the headmaster is ousted, the poor boys go, and the school is taken over by a military officer. In a startling scene the Father comes back to the school chapel during service and rapidly consumes all the communion wafers and then declares the chapel no longer holy; and the boys, led by Pedro, bid him a fond farewell. "Goodbye, children," he says, echoing and perhaps ripping off the moving end of Louis Malle's masterpiece ("Au revoir les enfants," which means "Goodbye, children") about a Jesuit priest taken away by the Nazis for hiding Jewish boys at a Catholic boarding school.

Most dramatic of all, Gonzalo is in Pedro's neighborhood during the murderous military purge and sees Silvana killed as soldiers take people away. Terrified at the possibility being linked with them and abducted or murdered himself, Gonzalo denies any connection with the people there, pointing to his Adidas. It's perhaps ironic to us to think that for several decades in America such shoes have been trophies worn by ghetto kids, at times stolen from rich boys to do so. Here they can only mean you're of the privileged classes.

Gonzalo rides his 'bici' away and walks straight into the luxurious home of his mother's lover, seeming to embrace for that moment the worst aspects of his own background out of fear -- scared "right," as it were. The boy who was displaced earlier to put Pedro next to Gonzalo in class is back in what has recently been Pedro's desk. But when he asks for answers to a test Gonzalo writes "ASSHOLE" (in most excellent English) on the paper and gives it back, turning in his own test with no answers -- as the boldest and coolest of the poor boys had once done -- and walking out.

The material in "Machuca" is undeniably important, relevant to crucial events in Latin American politics past and present. Many scenes in the film work, but a certain lack of charisma in the two boys is a flaw and the screenplay and direction aren't quite tight enough to prevent a few longueurs. In short, the filmmakers aren't entirely up to the demands of their compelling material. But the result is still essential viewing.

Ebola Syndrome begins in Hong Kong. The protagonist, an oddly charismatic anti-hero named Kai (Anthony Wong Chau-Sang), is having sex with a woman whom we first assume is a prostitute, but whom we shortly learn, more importantly, is his boss' (he seems to be a mob boss) wife. Kai and his lover are almost caught in the act. Kai does not bother trying to deny anything. The boss threatens to castrate him, but Kai cleverly takes advantage of the situation and wipes out his boss and the boss' cronies and wife. He almost takes out their young daughter, too, but at the last moment, just as he's about to set her afire, someone else walks into the apartment.

Kai flees to South Africa, where he ends up working in a Chinese restaurant. He went during the tail end up the Apartheid era, and as we catch up with him after the title credits, it's 1996, just after Apartheid has ended. Kai isn't very well respected. He's earning the least out of all of the employees and seems to be doing the most work. His new boss' wife particularly hates him, but his new boss seems to be somewhat sympathetic and regularly takes him out on business runs. When local white butchers want to rip them off, Kai and his boss head to a Zulu tribe area to buy meat from them instead. Unfortunately, they run into victims of the Ebola virus, and Kai, having his peculiar disposition, foolishly comes into close contact with a victim.

As a horror film, Ebola Syndrome is extremely effective. The early, amped-up violence in the film tends to push viewers out of their normal, emotionally stable states. Once the Ebola virus becomes a plot point, viewers are already halfway on their way to the kind of horror that doesn't involve scares so much as a feeling that the bottom is dropping out of their safe world views.

That's the kind of approach that's the most effective for me as horror, emotionally, because for whatever reason, films just cannot make me feel fear. Yau and scriptwriter Ting Chau go out of their way to convey just how dangerous something like Ebola is. In both the real world and the film, it is easily spread through any kind of bodily fluid, including droplets of mucus/saliva that enter the air when someone coughs or sneezes. In a densely populated area like Johannesburg or Hong Kong, that could spell widespread disaster. Later sections of the film focus on the countless ways that Kai is spreading the virus to others, who will spread it themselves. This engenders a lot of suspense, as does the burgeoning widespread panic. Yau achieves almost a classic George Romero vibe.

But surprisingly, Ebola Syndrome is also a macabre comedy. Especially early scenes are just as often laugh-out-loud funny as they are violent or disturbing. Often both modes arrive at the same time. The concern with humor disappears slightly in the latter half of the film, once Kai returns to Hong Kong, but the film doesn't suffer for the transition. Yau's direction, editing and all of the technical elements are smooth as silk throughout.

The beginning of Ebola Syndrome is also just as much a crime film as horror--in fact, it has a heavy Quentin Tarantino feel. Later sections are also just as much in the police-procedural subgenre and the final, extended sequence plays a bit more like a thriller that goes for the jugular.

Given the location hopping and the trip to the Zulu tribeland, Yau even conveys a slight sense of adventure. The combination of styles could easily become an unfocused mish-mash in lesser hands, but Yau makes it feel 100% "natural". And Anthony Wong Chau-Sang plays his role beautifully. He manages to sell Kai as a character who isn't exactly evil, but who sure is hell isn't innocent, either. Kai seems almost a bit developmentally disabled at times, and he's mostly likable despite his reprehensible actions. Kai is more a guy who continually has bad luck, but who just wants to have a good time in life. At the same time, he doesn't seem to really understand conventional ethical ideas. That's an extremely tough combination of qualities to convey, especially while the character is killing others right and left, but Anthony Wong Chau-Sang has created one of the most charismatic, engaging anti-heroes ever. The other performances are all great, too, but Kai is definitely the focus here.

Ebola Syndrome is as intelligent and artistic as it is controversial and disturbing. If you have even the slightest taste for over the top, graphically violent horror with a sense of humor, this is a must see.

This is a refreshingly unsentimental portrayal of one of the members of society that we all would prefer to ignore. The main character, Kaj, is a wellfare client with no prospects, he once had a job and was making a life for himself, but now he is a broken down alcoholic with a genuine but thinly-veiled deathwish. He is masterfully portrayed by Jesper Christensen who, deservedly, won both the Bodil and Robert awards for his performance. Enter a woman who says she is his daughter and suddenly his world becomes complicated. What is so great about this film is that it never wallows in pity and heartfelt sympathies for its protagonists and neither does it become a political manifesto about the sufferings of the lower classes. This is ultimately a movie about a man, a man who may have made some wrong decisions in his life but nonetheless a human being like the rest of us. Per Fly spent a lot of time with people whose life resembles that of the characters in order to achieve a high level of authenticity. As a result the setting of the film is thoroughly believable and the characters equally so. This is the first film in Per Fly's trilogy about the classes in Denmark, the second movie about the upper class premiers this week in Denmark and the third, about the middle class will begin preproduction shortly.

The Holy Mountain was director Alejandro Jodorowsky's follow up to the cult western El Topo; a violent and deeply mystical dream play about a mythical gunfighter cleansing himself of the violence of his past, only to find that the world itself had already been corrupted by the bloodshed of the present.

The mystical themes are fleshed out even further with The Holy Mountain, Jodorowsky's second of only three films produced in the 1970's, which, much like the preceding El Topo and the director's very first film, Fando é Lis, unfolds through a series of surrealist vignettes rife with religion symbolism, sardonic satire and distancing cinematic shock tactics. To some, it remains a monumental achievement of philosophy, mysticism and surrealist satire; a film capable of changing the viewer's entire perspective on life itself through the wisdom of its central character and the potency of its imagery. To others however, the film has already become a dated relic, with some viewers arguing that extravagant pop-art production design, casual nudity and notions of questing for inner peace and tranquillity have become throwbacks to the late 1960's flower-power aesthetic; which is always easy to discredit through blind cynicism.

How will you react to it? I couldn't possibly say, though I would say it's best to approach the film with an open mind and with some familiarity with Jodorowsky's previous, and indeed, subsequent cinematic works, like El Topo, and in particular Santa Sangre, both of which offer an easier gateway into the filmmaker's heavily symbolic world than this epic rumination on life and the cosmos.

What surprised me most when viewing the film for the first time was the tremendous amount of depth that can often be lost within the giddy barrage of sights and sounds that burst from the screen in a vibrant vivid collage of philosophy, art, sex and religion. As a result, I often find it annoying when people discredit Jodorowsky as simply throwing images on the screen to shock and disarm the viewer for no apparent reason. I find similar arguments regarding the work of filmmakers like David Lynch and Miike Takashi similarly offencive. Simply listen to the audio commentary on this DVD to hear Jodorowsky taking the film apart image by image; explaining the incredible amount of minor details purged from every religion, steeped in every form of art and combined in an attempt to overload the audience's senses and perceptions to effectively change the very fabric of their own personal universe. It worked for me, though as you can possibly gather from the previous reviews, opinions are mixed.

Some will be more open to Jodorowsky's ideas than others. Some will enjoy the colourful scenarios of the opening 30 minutes, which depict the resurrection of a Christ-like character and his corruption by the modern world ravaged by war, dictatorship, organised tourism and the endless pursuit of money. The second half of the film introduces us to the other characters; a collection of evil, greedy business men, weapon designers, factory owners and foot-soldiers who, much like the Christ-like character we meet during the first chapter, decide to abandon the corrupt world in which they exist and quest with the mythical central character to the summit of the holy mountain.

Herzog's characters tend to have an uneasy relation to language, whether they are Kaspar, who lives years in his life without language at all,Bruno(Stroszek,1976)who, rather than explaining his emotions,builds a "schematic model" of his feelings, or Fini Straubinger(Land of Silence and Darkness 1970),who cannot explain in words how it feels to be blind and deaf.Indeed, virtually all of Herzog's films are populated by marginal beings who resist language or who affirm its insufficiency to produce "true" meaning.For Herzog, their resistance to language is clearly a sign of their purity.More importantly, this resistance has the effect of rendering such figures opaque and image-like.An image that is visually striking but not wholly susceptible to verbal explanation.Their opacity gives them the quality of an unformulated image, an image that to some extent retards or actually interrupts the narrative flow with its non narrative effect.Kaspar is "outside of language and outside of difference," and later resists the patriarchal narrative with which he is equipped.Despite the pronounced literary subtext in these films, the dismissal of writing as a secondary mediation in contrast with the immediacy of the image occurs persistently in Herzog.The words of Kaspar's name spring up as the watercress he has planted, becoming living things in a triumphant romantic gesture that recalls Holderlin's longing, in BREAD AND WINE, for "words which spring up like flowers."By gestures such as these, Herzog has, in his view, redeemed language by transforming it first into a thing and then into an image.The lack of erotic impulse in Herzog's narratives is pronounced: the sexualized body is not of interest to Herzog and in his characters libidinal impulses tend to be sublimated into an all-consuming vision or to disappear into introit by some other means.Kaspar's enthusiasm for knitting that so shocks Lord Stanhope and in his general refusal to distinguish between male and female tasks.The black caped man who initiates Kaspar's entry into narrative, a symbolic father whose identity nevertheless remains enshrouded in mystery, resembles on one so much as Dr. Caligari in his black cape.As in some measure the "founding text" of German cinema and as an allegory per SE, THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI would naturally speak to a filmmaker anxious to create a bridge between German films of the Weimar period and those of his own time.So the black caped father functions here as the symbolic father of German cinema as well.Within the overall narrative of the film, it is the Caligari figure who intervenes with violence at various junctures in order,it would appear, to be able to direct its course.This violence, in turn, generates in the imagination of Kaspar a succession of visionary images that, like Herzog's films, begin with landscapes.When, in one dream sequence, Kaspar creates a mythical landscape of the Caucasus, a landscape with golden temples for which there has been no equivalent in his experience, Kaspar is creating with natural signs, like Herzog in hoping to bring "the real" into his film-making.

What an unclassifiable hybrid/whatever movie Stroszek is. I'd wager it's the kind of picture that Gonzo the Great (yes, the Muppet) would probably make if he were from Germany and looking to make a tragic-comic look on one man's journey in the rural side of America (after all, the last sequence would make perfect sense, wouldn't it). In truth, it's Werner Herzog at his most focused and un-hinged, a work of wild, original art where the tone ranges from harsh reality, documentary realism (or so we might think), to drama stripped of its 'melo', and a brand of satire that goes beyond the usual realm and is satirical only in the sense that you know something is being made fun of. In fact, I'd say the last twenty-five, thirty minutes of this picture are the funniest, and even in these minutes there's a sense of sorrow to what has happened with Bruno Stroszek (Bruno S., sort of as himself, I suppose, the line between fiction and fact is so blurry that it's the only way Herzog can get things done) and how his girlfriend (Eva Mattes) leaves him, and his best friend and neighbor gets arrested after armed robbery of a, uh, store in a basement next to a bank, I guess.

But whatever weirdness and sort of everyday mundane qualities that go hand in hand with the film Stroszek are given a greater context. I actually had a little more interest in what was going on after having just seen Chaplin's Modern Times, and seeing how there could be a comparison made to the two. Of course, Herzog could never be one to induce the silly physical comedy that makes up the bulk of Chaplin's films, but there is a similarity that struck me, and helped make me really care about what was going on with these characters- Herzog, for all his showing the ultimate follies, loves Stroszek, or at least does not try and show him off as being a complete waste of life. And if it does almost come off that way (Stroszek is, after all, a perpetual drunk who got released only recently from the mental hospital, and can never get steady work aside from being a mechanic once in the US), it's off-set by how much he even cares about the much more flawed Eva, too. He sees them in a context of society and civilization as well as just stand-alone outcasts (outcasts being another Chaplin comparison) not to mention the other side characters, both wretchedly cruel and mean like the Germans who bully Stroszek and beat up on Eva, or the wacky co-workers and very formal mortgage/loan people. So, in a way, Herzog takes on the other side of what we might usually find in a Chaplin effort, which includes cynicism (at least skepticism), despair, and replacing morality with a truly twisted sense of humor. Not that the form of documentary, more than anything, peeks its head into the work.

There isn't much story to report, aside from the bulk of what I've already mentioned- Stroszek, Eva and their elderly neighbor escape from the harsh and cruel state of being they're at in Berlin (a brief but interesting commentary on Germany too), only to find in the small-town Wisconsin life not much more in line of prosperity. Soon, Stroszek is on his own when he loses his trailer-home, Eva leaves him after a drunken ramble he goes on, and of course the aforementioned botched robbery. He heads off randomly to another small town, tells his story to a random guy, and then as his truck goes up in flames, he gets caught on a ski-lift after passing by a dancing chicken. All the while Bruno S. plays this guy with no punches pulled, and is as intuitive a non-professional actor as any given others in the old neo-realist days. Eva, too, wasn't that much of an actress yet when she took on this role. And a lot of the time (David Lynch mentioned this in an interview as he started watching the film in the middle) it's like watching a documentary of these people, showing in all the ordinary working-class ways how they get stuck and any chance of the "American dream" gets squashed. One's never really sure who's an actor or not, but it makes no difference really. A lot of it is some of the most harrowing cinema that I've seen in a while- the tone is of a bitterness at the system, any system, and of a sorrow that is everlooming, that is, perhaps, until the ending.

I had read about this in books about Joseph Losey, the director, but only last night did I have the opportunity to watch it on video. Monsieur Klein has obvious similarities with the works of Kafka, with the main character's fate gradually becoming indistinguishable from that of a Jewish namesake, to the point where he is herded off to an destination unknown to him which we know to be a concentration or extermination camp. At the start of the film he was a parasite making a good living off the need of Jews to sell off art objects for a relative pittance, but at the end he shares the fate of many Jews. In a film with many standout scenes, there are two which deserve special mention: the opening scene where a woman is poked and prodded by a doctor to determine whether she is racially inferior or not, and the scene when the French police raid Klein's premises and remove most of the art objects he possesses because he is suspected of being Jewish. Klein hands a woman friend a scrap of music and asks her to play it on the piano. She does so, not recognising it and asking if it is a military march, but the police are furious and demand that she stops. The music is the Communist song, the "Internationale". Klein gives no indication that he knows what it is but calls on her to continue playing it, perhaps as a gesture of defiance.

A comparison of Bertolucci's The Conformist with the novel by Alberto Moravia from which it was adapted illuminates much about the ambitious style and structure of the film. For instance, Bertolucci chose not to follow the novel's omniscient point of view. Instead, he uses the intensely subjective and heavily unreliable point of view of the story's main character, Marcello (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a child of decadent aristocracy who embraces fascism, not from ideological commitment but from a desire to blend in with his social surroundings. Bertolucci also structures the film's plot in a non-linear manner rather than emulating Moravia's chronological narration. This strategy yields a film equivalent of the modern novel's characteristic "stream-of-consciousness" technique, whereby the inner workings of Marcello's mind, his desire for "normality" at all costs, are plumbed in a fragmented series of recollections held together by psychological association rather than direct cause and effect.

Bertolucci's approach transforms Moravia's rather conventional, socio-political novel into a much more intimate and complex psychological study of the protagonist. The film's subjective point of view emotionally intensifies the formative and revealing experiences of Marcello's life such as his encounter as a young man with a male seducer, his shamed alienation from his parents, his deliberate courtship of and marriage to a shallow bourgeois young lady, and his ambivalent relationship with his anti-fascist former professor and the professor's liberated, bisexual wife. Two plot alterations from the novel are also worth noting. One is in the manner and location of the assassination of the professor and his wife, which occurs much more matter-of-factly in the novel. Bertolucci changes the setting to an isolated, snow-covered stretch of countryside where Marcello witnesses the execution and, by doing nothing to prevent or protest it, becomes morally complicit in the act. A second change involves the plot outcome for Marcello himself. Whereas in the novel Marcello and his family are killed by Allied bombing while attempting to flee Rome, the film's ending is much more open and ambiguous.

Technically, The Conformist's indisputably brilliant cinematography, directed by Vittorio Storaro (Apocalypse Now), combines with some of the finest low budget set decoration in film history to poetically evoke a 1930s European setting that seems simultaneously real and surreal. Such scenes as the blind persons' ball, Marcello's meeting with his father in a stadium-like insane asylum, his walk through the Italian fascist government building, and the justly famous low-angle shot of blowing leaves are either hauntingly lyrical or startlingly nightmarish or, often, lyrical and nightmarish simultaneously. Many shots in the first two thirds of the film are skewed by slightly oblique camera angles to suggest that we are seeing a reality shaped by Marcello Clerici 's selective, distorting memory. This visual style radically shifts once the climactic assassination takes place and Marcello's consciousness is absorbed entirely into the film's present time. George Delerue's musical score and other elements of the soundtrack also greatly enhance the wonderfully nuanced mood shifts within and between the complex narrative strains of the plot. Quite simply, The Conformist is an unforgettable masterpiece of the highest orde

It is closing time in a bar somewhere in Eastern Europe. Someone says, "Show us, Janos". A blank faced young man, Janos Valuska (Lars Rudolph), begins to organize a ballet of inebriated patrons playing the Sun and the Moon turning in their orbits. Valuska pleads, "All I ask is that you step with me into the bottomlessness." As the dance continues, the men are spun. They stop suddenly as the orchestrater tells us that "in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, everything that lives is stillâ?¦" Then, with a push, the dancers carry on until the Earth emerges from the Moon's shadow. The eternal conflict between darkness and light begins again.

Containing shots that last up to fifteen minutes at a time, Werckmeister Harmonies, the latest film by Bela Tarr (Satantango, Damnation), is a nightmarish vision of a society duped by political demagogues and distracted by circuses, being led into a cycle of violence and despair. Based on a novel by László Krasznahorkai, it is a powerful and disturbing film that, in its surreal depiction of growing madness in an unnamed town, is reminiscent of Roy Andersson's Songs From the Second Floor. The film takes its name from the theories of Janos' "uncle" Gyorgy Eszter (Peter Fitz), a musicologist who tells him of his obsession with the legacy of Andreas Werckmeister, a 17th century German musician who created the twelve-tone scale. Eszter believes that perfect order does injustice to the holiness of music, and says that the heavens move to their own music.

As Janos leaves the bar and walks through the cold and half-deserted streets, streets that in T.S. Eliot's phrase "follow like a tedious argument of insidious intent", an enormous van drives up the main street and comes to rest in a great empty square in the town center. A circus is in town. The exhibit contains the world's largest whale, dead and stuffed with tiny staring eyes, and The Prince, a shadowy figure that we never see. The town is full of rumors of impending violence. Janos sees the whale and watches a growing group of seemingly unemployed middle aged men gather silently around fires in the square. He seems to know everyone in the town. To further her political agenda of "town cleansing" (read ethnic cleansing), Eszter's estranged wife, Tunde (Hanna Schygulla), sends the compliant Janos on errands. He is told to put the children of the police chief to bed but, as if presaging the coming violence, they stomp on their beds to a cacophony of noise while one shouts at Janos over and over again. "It will be hard for you". "It will be hard for you." He is also asked to listen to conversations in the square and report back to her, but he only hears the Prince saying, `What they build and what they will build is illusion and lies. What they think and what they will think is ridiculous'.

When the signal is given, the men in the square come together and march towards us with growing anger in a hypnotic parade lasting five terrifying minutes. They go on a rampage, setting fires and ransacking a hospital, beating the sick in an unbroken orgy of violence. Patients huddle by their beds in silent fear. Suddenly a door is opened. Confronted by the menacing faces, an emaciated old man stands naked in a shower bathed in an amorphous light. Transfixed by what they have seen, the men abandon their task and retreat silently into the street. On the morning after, order is restored. The van is broken down and the whale is exposed as little more than an overstuffed balloon. The Sun emerges from behind the Moon to the swell of ineffably beautiful music. We have reached the end of the cycle only to begin dancing again when the next Prince calls the tun

Hiroshi Teshigahara's "Woman in the Dunes" is truly a unique movie. It's about an entomologist who goes on a holiday, only to find himself trapped in huge sand pit with a woman. The woman has no will to get out of the sand (it's been "broken"--like that of a stable horse--no doubt), but he refuses to live a "meaningless" life in the sand pit (like the woman). He tries to get out, but it's all in vain: the wall of sand is an impenetrable barrier between him and his "freedom." And so the story goes. The sand pit, I guess, is a metaphor for humanity's existentialist plight. Like the mythological Sisyphus, who was condemned for eternity to roll a rock to the top of a hill only to have it roll back down again, the two characters in this film dig sand out of their pit--but the sand keeps coming back....which raises the question: If life is meaningless--as Satre and Camus have said--what will we do? Do we keep digging? Do we opt for suicide instead? Or what? This is one of those films that haunt you after you see it; you'll keep thinking of it during subsequent days and even weeks. It is also distinguished by its luscious and crisp black and white deep focus photography. "The Woman in the Dunes" is (sadly) a far too little-known cinematic treasure that is thought-provoking, beautiful, erotic, and even eerie. Once you see it, you won't soon forget it.

The Color of Pomegranates, created by genius Sergei Parajanov, is a semi-biography about poet Sayat Nova, showing young Sayat growing up, discovering female forms, falling in love, entering a monastery, dying, etcetera. However, Parajanov does not show Sayat's life in traditional narration and realistic settings, but he reveals his life through a series of beautifully dreamlike tableaux and Armenian spiritual poetry. The movie is a visual feast, all set with hypnotic, surreal sets, vivid colors, even the costumes are visual candy. The movie has almost no acting (I don't mean that in a bad way), but people in costumes repeating strange tableaux and movements. There is also virtually no dialog. Instead they resort to oneiric visuals. However, the no dialog/no acting only adds to the film's dreamlike, mysterious quality. "Pomegranates" movie is a beautiful, metaphoric masterpiece that could be pulled off only by Mr. Parajanov.

Note: It is near impossible to understand or like this film by anyone who doesn't know about Armenian religion, or Sayat Nova. It is a very difficult film, so I would recommend it to very little people. The problem is that all sorts of film buffs in North America don't understand this film, so they automatically think it's awful. It really isn't, it's just that many people in North America are used to "real" films with acting and plot. However, I watched this with an open mind and now this is my favourite film of all time (or at least tying with 2001: A Space Odyssey). So please, do understand, this film is not really a film at all, and it's not really supposed to be. Approach with open mind.

he movie starts from the tragic story of a peasant youth who falls in love, looses his loved one and eventually dies. The narrative is very simple and it only constitutes a departure point used to build a whole universe that revolves around the life of Ukrainian peasants in the Carpathian Mountains at the middle of the 19th century. Essential to the movie is the description of a life which is so much filled with beauty and emotion coming from beliefs and customs that to forget it would be simply a shame. One has to acknowledge that the film was banned in USSR because the language is not Russian but Ukrainian and the film emphasizes what the regime must have thought as the particularities of a local culture encouraging a type of nationalism that didn't conform to the Soviet doctrine. Since it is a movie about a rural community religion obviously plays the most important role in these peoples lives (something that was also a problem for the regime). But Christianity does not occupy the whole specter of religious beliefs, as the movie very cleverly shows, heathen traditions, maybe older than Christianity, have a greater power over people's lives. Christianity is in a way the official religion that glues the community together, people greet themselves with "Praised be Jesus", but other spiritual forces are also working in this world, and we can see that considering the appeal to witchcraft, the presence of ghosts and so on.

The movie-makers were not, in my opinion, trying to present a story but a way of life, a forgotten world. The soundtrack of this film is absolutely amazing, the costumes are beautiful and the landscapes are to die for. The brilliantly executed cinematography makes this film one of the most visually impressive I have ever seen, the color helps the development of the narrative ( there is a shift from color to B&W similar to Stalker or The Wizard of Oz), the angles render the images unforgettable (when a tree falls on one of the characters the viewer's perspective falls with the tree, when a character is killed with an axe you are situated in the place of the victim) and at the end when the main character sees his dead loved one and she pulls him into death, the man is presented in intense color and the woman seems almost black and white, emphasizing the difference between the realm of the living and that of the dead.

This movie will reveal in only 90 minutes more than hundreds of pages of ethnology will be able to tell you, making you really live in that fantastic realm. Many of the devices present in cinema at the time are effectively used with the purpose of creating this enchanting atmosphere. We start from inter-titles similar to those in silent movies and go up to the most striking editing job present on screen, more challenging than what Godard was doing at that time, there are freeze-frames used very efficiently, low camera angles similar to those used by Welles and a brilliant speculation of the qualities of color in a period when Bergman was making All These Women which is in my opinion very poor in comparison with his B&W films. Godard had already made Le Mepris but the use of color there is not as challenging as it is here.

This movie goes to show you that you can be both conservative and revolutionary, Paradjanov uses the most up to date cinema techniques to recreate the world of forgotten ancestors, and we would say a backward, even primitive world! Is this paradoxical? Like art itself!

Day of Wrath returns to the subject of Christianity's role as a persecuting agent. We are in Denmark in the mid 17th century, at the time of the notorious witch trials. Anne (Lisbeth Movin), who has just married a widowed priest old enough to be her father, falls in love with the priest's son from his first marriage, who is visiting the family home during a break from his theological studies. Cue for the priest's elderly but still formidable mother to accuse the young home-wrecker of witchcraft - an accusation made the more plausible (in her eyes at least) by the fact that the girl's mother, at some time in the distant past, had shown signs of harbouring a similar disposition, and had been spared retribution only through her son's (misguided) intervention.

So is Anne a witch or isn't she? Naturally, Dreyer doesn't believe in witches - and neither do we, the modern audience. But neither is Anne timid or innocent. In her smouldering glances, no less than in the sincerity of her love for the young theological student who has stumbled into her life, Anne dramatises (most beautifully and subtly) a defiance of convention that can only be called bewitching or witchlike. In some profound, moving and tragic way she is a witch (as perhaps, in another way, Joan is too). And since she is a witch, she will perish for it... As for organised Christianity, there's no mistaking Dreyer's indignation at the crimes that have been committed in its name, for the best and worst reasons imaginable (there's no pity here for superstition or foolishness). Yet it's part of the film's realism, and of Dreyer's historical scrupulousness, that the dignitaries of the church are presented as whole human beings, in their own shades of grey, and that the church itself, as an institution, should be painted with a weight and eloquence that resist the reductiveness of caricature.

1902: Arseniev (Yuri Solomin), a czarist officer and his men exploit and map the Usuri-region. The gigantic pine-forests of the Taiga evoke visions of the Walpurgis-night. Dersu Uzala (Maxim Munzuk) sits down at their camp-fire and smokes his pipe. The old man who lost his wife and children during a smallpox epidemic lives in the mountains without permanent refuge and hunts the stag, the wild boar, the sable. He benefits from the nature but does not exhaust it. As a matter of course he takes the lead of the expedition, shows them how to cover a roof with bark and instructs them to leave stock - rice, salt, matches - for other travelers. They learn not to squander cartridges and that an empty bottle is valuable in the wilderness. They wade through the morass and suddenly the winter sets in.

Arseniev and Dersu lose their way on the ice-covered lake Hanka and the snow-drift covers their footprints. Their race against time is perhaps the most breathtaking scene in the film: the men cut as many blades of grass as possible in order to survive the cold night. Arseniev realizes how small man is in front of the big nature. He invites Dersu to join him ("It' comfortable in the city") but he prefers his free life. He sees the men off to the train station and they agree: " He is such a good man!".

1907, spring, snow-break: Arseniev explores the Usuri-region again. Three months later a vast territory has been mapped, but the task would be carried through quicker with Dersu's help. Arseniev looks out for his old friend: Dersu made much money with furs but a trader disappeared with his savings.

The Taiga in summer is a jungle. "Amdar" (the tiger) follows them. They discover pitfalls with carrion; Dersu is shocked over their needless death. He is at war with the Chunchuse who abduct women. Arseniev helps him save three of their victims who were nearly drowning, but Dersu falls in a torrential river and the rescue-operation is another absorbing (and ingenious) moment in the film.

The turning point in Dersu's life comes when he inadvertently kills the tiger. He becomes nervous and irritable and fears that the spirit "Kangar" will punish him. His vision becomes defective; he misses his game. "How can I live in the Taiga?". Arseniev invites him to Chaberowsk: "My house is your house". His wife welcomes Dersu in their house and his little son worships him, but Dersu cannot manage life in the city where water and wood cost money; He is arrested when he tries to fell a tree...He feels redundant and decides to return to the mountains. Arseniev understands his request and gives him a brand-new gun as farewell-present. A few days later he is forced to identify his old friend's body: Somebody killed Dersu - for his gun.

DERSU UZALA needs no recommendation: it won best foreign film in 1975 and every fan of Akira Kurosawa will see it sooner or later. Central Asia, this gigantic territory is awe-inspiring in itself (and bear in mind that there is no wilderness in Japan where nearly every tree has been cultivated for aesthetic reasons) and the cinematography is overwhelming - I regret that I have not seen the film on the big screen. What impressed me most was the high-mindedness of the performances. There is not one patronizing undertone. Deep respect for those people who live in, of, and most importantly, with the nature pervades this film.

Wim Wenders' praising, honest, confessional, hurriedly made and rather superficial love letter to the great Japanese filmmaker (and essential influence on WW's work) Yasujiro Ozu. This documentary intermingles some footage of Ozu's Tokyo Monogatari (in a bad copy, which is really a disservice to Ozu's art!); highly reverent interviews with Ozu's signature actor Chishu Ryu and longtime cameraman Yuharu Atsuta, both in their eighties but remarkably keen; and Wenders' own discovery (it's his first time there) of a high-tech, overcrowded, Americanized Tokyo, radically different from WW's preconceived image of an almost provincial post-war Tokyo that he had idealized through Ozu's films.

There are beautiful images by great cameraman Ed Lachman, especially the night shots; but overall it's pretty much familiar territory: trains (old trains, new trains, bullet trains), the overcrowded subway, the concrete jungle, the neon signs, the "copycat" fetishism (fake food, fake golf, fake rock'n'roll), baseball games, the video game mania, Japanese politeness, Japanese formality, Japanese impenetrability. It's a traveling journal, narrated by WW himself, where insightful and obvious remarks come in turns. It's a film with too few highlights (Atsuta's interview, Werner Herzog's maniac speech about his search for "clean, pure images"), and inevitably superficial: like all big towns, Tokyo can't be covered and deciphered by a first-timer; and like all great artists, Ozu's unique universe can't be grasped by a couple of interviews, anecdotes or images. When WW talks about Ozu's art, he's of course telling us about himself and his own cinema.

There's a telling sequence, where WW gets to meet French filmmaker Chris Marker in a Tokyo night-bar called "La Jetée" (the title of Marker's landmark 1962 science-fiction/photo-poem short). Marker - who spent considerable time in Japan over the years -- put Tokyo and Japanese culture at the center of one of the most brilliant personal essays/ journals ever filmed, the incomparable "Sans Soleil" (1982). At one point, WW mentions that "Sans Soleil" is filled with "images of Japan not allowed to foreigners like me". Hence my suggestion: if you want to know more about Ozu, watch his films; if you want to see a revealing, knowledgeable essay by a Westerner on Japan, pass on "Tokyo-Ga" and try "Sans Soleil" instead.

'Sans Soleil' opens with a ferry trip to Japan, with the camera peering at sleeping passengers. This is a perfect encapsulation of the film as a whole, a beautiful mixture of journey and dream. The film is ostensibly a documentary, that holier-than-thou genre convinced of its own superior truthfulness. And the film is full of documentary images, snapshots from the faraway places Marker visits, Japan, Africa, South America, San Francisco, Iceland, Paris. The film is full of the observations of the filmmaker about the cultures he observes.

But 'Sans Soleil' couldn't soar further from the prosaic ambitions of the documentary. Like the film it most resembles, Marker's own 'La Jetee', it is in fact a work of science fiction, as much about time travel as literal travel. Each place Marker visits is stripped of its familiarity, and made eerie, alien. Concrete images become springboards for dizzy philosophical speculations. The film moves with ease from the court of 11th century Imperial Japan to the revolutionary struggles in 1960s Africa to emus on the Ile de France to an interpretation of Hitchcock's 'Vertigo' to astrological rumination on a desert beach, and still remains thematically coherent and full of the most startling connections.

It is this structure that creates the feel of science fiction, the linking of seemingly disparate images, symbols, stories, experiences, places to create a strange pattern which emanates something spiritual, that seems to make sense of increasing chaos, dislocation, displacement. But we are constantly reminded that these are secular, man-made, ad-hoc, arbitrary constructions, as phantom as the relationship in 'La Jetee', but, similarly, a necessary construction to cover the abyss.

The distortion of the soundtrack, the mixture of silence and mooged classics; the computer visuals of Marker's friend, known as The Zone, which seep conventional, representational images and turn them into ghosts, traces, stripped of history, recognisability, humanity; the film's fictional framework (the narrative comprises letters to the narrator by the filmmaker, Sandor Krasna) all add to this unsettling science fiction appropriation of the documentary genre.

When the history of cinema comes to be written in centuries to come, there will really only be two films that will survive from its first century, films dense, supple, playful, renewable enough, and full of enough possibilities for future direction, to transcend the local, the generic, the pretentious, the narrative. One is that final gasp of modernist cinema, 'Vertigo'; the other is this epitome of post-modernity. in many ways, 'Sans Soleil' is a stunning exegisis on Hitchcock's masterpiece (which had only just been re-released after two-decades withdrawel), echoing its circular structure, its concern with time, memory, the elusiveness of history.

'Soleil' locates the crisis of post-modernity in Japan, that most modern of modern capitalist societies. With the curiosity of an anthropologist, the good humour of an essayist, and the eye for the unusual of a rare filmmaker, Marker gives us a Japan we rarely see, even in the country's own cinema; on the one hand a culture of startling modernity, leading the way in computers, technology, department stores etc., on the other full of residual traditions, rituals, superstitions, ceremonies, going back centuries. The co-existence of these two time-scales has resulted in a kind of blur, a temporal vacuum, whereby all sense of time and perspective is lost, where religious ceremonies for the souls of stray pets co-exist with state-of-the-art video games.

Japan is like a ship that has lost its anchor, where all time is the same, and therefore irrelevant, just as Scottie Ferguson wanders around dazed, in a loop of fantasy and distorted memory. Without history, memory, a culture ceases to be a culture and lays itself open to all sorts of vulnerability. But this lack of foundation ironically leads to a greater freedom, particularly of the mind, and the film, as it reaches its conclusion, becomes visionary and hallucinatory.

'Soleil' is anything but bleak - its stories, myths, cultural tidbits, observations are unfailingly entertaining and full of good humour. Krasna compares the overcultured, saturated Japan to the timeless emptiness of Africa, to the spooky otherworldliness of Iceland, as his 'objective' narrative becomes increasingly a personal odyssey that must be teased out from hints and ellipses. In its focusing on the minutae, the forgotten, the arcane, the ephemeral, the back alleys, the garbage, but suggesting that 'Soleil' is ultimately only one film out of a possible multitude made possible by new technologies, Marker's film is at once profoundly democratic yet exhilaratingly idiosyncratic; an apocalyptic vision teeming with life.

'La Jetee' is a film about movement made up entirely of photographic stills. Well, not entirely. For one transcendent moment the photo moves, ironically at the film's stillest moment, as a woman we have starred at sleeping in the sunny dawn wakes up. It is typical of Marker that a film spanning centuries, millenia, war, torture, experimentation, murder, dreams, time travel, destruction, love, joy, should have as its epiphanical moment an elusive, delusive moment of utter calm, that of a sleeping woman opening her eyes. In a film whose body is the stuff dreams are made on, such a moment is truly cataclysmic.

Like all Marker's masterpieces, 'Jetee', ostensibly a work of science-fiction, is profoundly concerned with Time, Memory and History. Such abstracts treated in lesser hands have a tendency to become vague, airy, removed from life; but Marker, the old leftist, always grounds his philosophy, humanisises and politicises it.

'Jetee', though a short, is rich with ambiguity and irony - the freedom of dreams, to reinvent the past, to escape from circumstances, is exploited by a totalitarian oligarchy, and ultimately fatal for the dreamer. Such is our desperate need to dream, to escape, forget/reinvent, that it is easy to forget that the Man's relationship with the Woman is a phantom, an entire history blown out of a brief glimpse, like that Baudelaire poem where he is stunned by a brief glimpse of a woman he never sees again.

It is this act the tyrants need, this gesture of recreation - by embodying what never happened, by making real or factual what is ultimately desire, he has destroyed history; this paves the way for the vision of 3000, where history is destroyed, and along with it humanity; a Houhnyhm-land of disembodied intelligence. This idea of the death of history, of the victory of post-modernity, would be most eloquently in Marker's chef d'oeuvre, 'Sans Soleil', which was shown with this film at the screening I attended.

But Marker's great achievement here is his creation of the future as a regression, as a descent into medievalism, part-Les Miserables, part-Occupation, with all the signs of French progress and pretension destroyed, with all Haussman's modernity and prosperity run to earth by nuclear contamination, the survivors living in sewers with rats, as their ancestors once did.

Marker's vision is terrifying in its mixture of ruined symmetry and a sickening moral blackness, the general silence punctuated by impenetrable whispers and noises - this is one of the most frightening soundtracks I've ever heard. This medievalism also means a bypassing of the intellect, of literal Enlightenment, and back to a kind of spiritual murk, with pastiche sacred music flooding the film, and parodies of religious kitsch obtruding (the godlike light seeping into dense interiors; religious slogans; the compositions of survivors like beatified saints) on the relics of civilisation, the graffiti, the now-impenetrable codes.

This chaos is contrasted with the Paris of the dream, especially in the museum scene, even more chilling with its statues looking like petrified relics from a volcanic disaster; the mute, stuffed animals warning humans of their fate; the exquisite composition of architecture, trapping the couple in a web of order, boxes, classification, obsolescence, the doomed attempts by mankind to order the universe.

yet this dream is so moving because it offers love, connection, gardens, talk, dreams, Paris, even if they are illusory. because, although this is a dense, difficult, allusive, modern film, it also illuminates a simple, ancient truth 'In the midst of life, we are in death'

Perhaps the most powerful non-fiction Holocaust film ever made, Alain Resnais' 'Night and Fog' is a truly shocking glimpse into the horrors of the Jewish concentration camps of World War Two. Released just ten years after the liberation of the camps, with the memories of the Holocaust still frighteningly raw, the film combines black-and-white archival footage and still images with colour footage filmed at the decaying Auschwitz site in 1955. What results is a truly horrifying account, its power undiminished by time or the release of countless other Holocaust pictures over the years. Whilst 'Schindler's List' was a meticulously-crafted drama, and 'La Vita è bella' made us cry through tears, and 'The Pianist' was a haunting tale of survival, 'Night and Fog' is comprised of real-life archival footage. Those decaying, emaciated bodies are not the bodies of actors or dummies; they are the bodies of real people. The fear and confusion evident upon those faces is not a triumph of stellar acting, but the result of cruelly forcing a human being to endure horrors more terrible than we can ever imagine.

The director of this film knows how indescribable the horrors of the Holocaust are. The narrator, Michel Bouquet, often speaks with an air of skepticism or doubt, often remarking "(it is) useless to describe what went on in these cells," or, "words are insufficient," or "no description, no picture can reveal their true dimension." The archive footage is used mainly to speak for itself, supplemented by Bouquet's astringent, matter-of-fact narration. According to the director, Bouquet was initially instructed to narrate using a "neutral tone," though his voice does contain almost a hint of irony, as if nothing he could ever say would ever fully describe the horrors of the Holocaust.

Certain images cling to the mind long after the half-hour film has concluded. Whilst in any dramatised fictional film, such images might be considered beautifully poignant (Spielberg's little girl in the red coat, perhaps?), the images in 'Night and Fog' could more accurately be described as a nightmare. Skeletal human forms lay motionless on crowded bunk beds; a mammoth pile of woman's hair waits to be manufactured into cloth; thousands of rotting bodies are bulldozed into a burial pit. By contrasting the repulsion of these images with the tranquil silence of the modern colour footage, Resnais reinforces his assertion that today it is effectively impossible to imagine what these unfortunate detainees were forced to endure.

The title of the film ('Nuit et Brouillard'), from the German 'Nacht und Nebel,' was taken from the title of the memoirs of the film's writer, Jean Cayrol. After escaping from the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, Cayrol released 'Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard' in 1946. This title itself refers to Nacht und Nebel, a directive of Adolf Hitler on December 7 1941, which resulted in the kidnapping and disappearance of many political activists throughout Nazi Germany's occupied territories.

Renais "Providence" has all the hallmarks of cinema at its artistic best. Every component of film making is expertly handled. David Mercer's literary screenplay is a joy to listen to, especially when delivered by the likes of Dirk Bogarde and of course the legendary John Gielgud. The visuals are haunting and perfectly shot with detailed attention to set and costume. Miklos Rosza's soundtrack is in total accordance with the work as a whole, never intrusive, while adding to the rich tapestry that is "Providence". Renais too has assembled a wonderful if somewhat odd cast, which suitably serve this somewhat odd film.

Gielgud plays a dying author whose mind is racing with fantasies peopled by members of his family. His character Clive Langham is depicted as a ribald, sensual, womanizer. Yet his fantasies, making up the bulk of the film, are curiously cold and stark. They are played in bleak settings with an ever present sense of impending catastrophe, though remaining totally devoid of emotion. These imaginings are at completely at odds with their creator. The extreme incongruousness of these fantasies with the character to whom they belong, remains a mystery. This detracts much in the way of emotional impact which is very much lacking in the film, whether intentional or not. The elimination of emotion leaves "Providence" a cold, wonderfully intelligent exercise in the art of film making.

Renais has assembled an intriguing cast headed by the superb Gielgud. Dirk Bogarde whose performances have often been tinged with a cold, sauve superciliousness brings this unpleasant quality to an unparalleled level of extremity. Even the usually over emoting Ellen Burstyn delivers a restrained performance. Elaine Stritch has to be the oddest choice for the role being so contrary to her well known persona. Never has a more unlikely coupling been presented than Stitch and Bogarde as lovers. Yet in this emotionless void, even that becomes acceptable.

"Providence" is a highly unusual, important film and shouldn't be missed by the discerning film enthusiast. Yet despite the wealth of cinematic craft on display it remains an unsatisfying experience.

This is a superb, sinister movie of the very highest class. Unlike the character Tony (James Fox) who is upper class without being high class, if you get my drift. You cannot really sympathise with Tony, who toys with some high falutin' development projects but basically is a wastrel just waiting to be ponced off. Tony is a later-day Bertie Wooster. The sinister element comes from the servant (Dirk Bogarde), who is no Jeeves. Barrett, like Jeeves , is a gentleman's gentleman or valet (not a butler as suggested in some other comments on this film). Tony needs a valet because he is incapable of doing anything much without help. Barrett and his accomplice Vera (Sarah Miles) take Tony to the cleaners, sweeping aside the fiancee Susan (Wendy Craig) in their wake.

Harold Pinter has written the screenplay in similar vein to the superb movie The Accident, also a Losey piece, which I also commend. The cinematography in both movies is simply excellent. The subject matter of The Servant suits Pinter, although much of the screenplay is not really in Pinter's voice. However, there is one scene, set in a restaurant, which includes a tiny cameo by Pinter himself and which contains a short Pinteresque exchange between two women. There is also one tense exchange between Susan and Barrett "do you wear deodorant" etc. which is very reminiscent of a scene in The Caretaker "you stink from arsehole to Thursday" etc. Indeed the story of The Servant resembles The Caretaker in many respects, except that in The Servant the interloper, Barrett, is on top and stays there, whereas in The Caretaker the interloper, Davies, lacks the skill and circumstances to dislodge the incumbent.

There is a homoerotic undercurrent to the film and this works so well because it is an undercurrent (in 1963 there could have been no more than an undercurrent even if they had wanted more). The overt debauchery with Vera and the orgy party towards the end of the film is the only bit of the film that has aged without grace. But I quibble.

The Conversation is a quiet film that slowly builds on the central theme of paranoia. Gene Hackman is hired to record a conversation between two people. As Hackman pieces the dialouge together, we get to hear more and more of what's being said. Only thing is, we don't know exactly what is being referred to. Hackman seems to have an idea, as does the audience. As he starts to realize what's at stake, Hackman starts to develop a feeling of regret and refuses to hand over the tapes to the "director." Along the way, we see just how alone Gene Hackman's character is. His only solace in life is playing the saxaphone along with jazz records. He values his privacy and has trouble connecting with people, even members of his own team. Francis Ford Coppola keeps the story moving and lets it build naturally. He gives us glimpses into Hackman's mind as he "thinks" he knows what's going to happen to the people he recorded. The only way to see what happens in the end is to watch this quiet masterpiece. To tell about the ending would ruin the fun, not to mention the suspence of this understated thriller.

The film begins as what appears to be a pastiche of the American detective movie of the 1950s, but then suddenly takes a dive into the Twilight Zone. What follows is a perplexing 100 minutes of cinema that manages to be classic film noir, imaginative science-fiction, an action-packed and suspenseful thriller and - most surprisingly of all - a very entertaining black comedy, in the mould of Dr Strangeglove. By trying to blend so many contrasting elements, the result could have easily been a disaster. That the films succeeds, and succeeds admirably, is down largely to two factors.

Firstly, Eddy Constantine plays the part of Lemmy Caution, the private detective, throughout with total conviction, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he is playing a complete parody (and a very funny one) of a character he had made his own in the preceding decade. In the 1950s, Constantine played the hard-nosed detective in a series of French films of the traditional American detective genre. It would have been very easy for a lesser actor to ham the part up or downplay the character, but Constantine does neither, and the result is utterly brilliant.

We have a familiar character transposed from a familiar milieu into a parallel universe, where everything appears to be superficially familiar but then is shown to be a distortion of what we see in our own world - a kind of Humphrey Bogart through the Looking Glass. Over and over again, we are surprised at how easily we are tripped up and misled by our own preconceptions. This would not have been possible without a strong central character who is firmly anchored in our world - and Eddy Constantine serves this purpose brilliantly. The fact that he works so well with his co-star, the superb and very stylish Anna Karina, is a bonus.

Secondly, Alphaville's creator, Godard, appears to be at the height of his powers as a director. He shows complete mastery of the revolutionary cinematographic techniques which he thrust onto an unsuspecting world in the early years of the New Wave (the late 1950s). Far more accessible than some of Godard's contemporary films (such as La Chinoise and Weekend), the style is nonetheless distinctive and fresh, somehow giving the film an extra dimension that constantly surprises and entertains. Godard is also responsible for the script, an adaptation of a novel by Peter Cheyney, where he manages, quite cleverly, to draw parallels between the futuristic soulless society of Alphaville and contemporary France. (There are more than a few direct statements to suggest that Godard regards his own country as Alphaville - for example the infamous HLM joke. Godard appears to see France ending up as an isolationist state, seeming to have imperialistic ambitions, with its language under strict state control - not an uncommon caricature of the country in the latter years of the 20th century.)

Popular concerns about the impact of computer technology on society are also exploited by Godard who suggests that widespread dehumanisation and total state control will be the outcome.

Paul Misraki's enigmatic background music adds to the eerie other-wordly atmosphere of the ensemble.

Overall, an amazing film that never ceases to surprise and shock. A dark and very frightening thriller, a comic pastiche of detective films, a love story, a sci-fi movie with a power-mad (and asthmatic) computer... how Godard managed to pull this one off is probably one of the great mysteries of cinema history. Watch, listen, laugh and be amazed

Though perhaps 'Still Life'/'Sanxia haoren' (the Variety reviewer thought so) is primarily for the Jia devotee or the festival-goer (it's already been awarded the Golden Lion at Venice) and certainly it's totally noncommercial, it's a lovely, hypnotic piece of work, another haunting picture of the vast creation, disruption, destruction that is modern China from that country's most exciting and original younger-generation filmmaker.

There are layers of irony in the title, because in the incredibly turbulent, ceaselessly active events on screen in this world of life that is anything but "still," the most amazing images slip by without comment. A construction boss on a rampart one evening cell-phones a technician and says, "The VIP's are here. Why aren't the lights on? I'll count to three; then turn on. One, two, three. . ." and a huge bridge and arch are suddenly illuminated behind him. One of the two estranged couples the film follows to tentative reunions is talking with a vast city behind them and in the background a big skyscraper suddenly, silently collapses. There is no comment. It just miraculously happens. In the final shot, amid the debris of the Three Gorges where the world's largest dam will eventually displace 1.4 million people, Han Sanming (non-actor Han Sanming's actual name), a mine worker who's come to find his wife and daughter, who left him sixteen years ago, stands looking out at the urban landscape and a trapeze artist is quietly walking across a tightrope between tall buildings. Again, no comment.

Han Sanming can't find his wife right away and her brother doesn't trust him at first, so he stays for months, working with the brother in demolition. A perky young fellow, who quotes John Wu star Chow Yun Fat and imitates Hong Kong gangster gestures, befriends Han Sanming and they put each other's numbers in their cell phones--a contemporary pledge of solidarity that has a sad sequel later. The young fellow, who could easily have been one of the lost, hopeful young men in Jia's 2002 Unknown Pleasures, is lost in a demolition accident and gets a sea burial like the one accorded to Johnny Depp's character in Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man.

Focused on the displacement of people for a vast industrial and engineering project, Still Life also contrasts classes--the humble working-class stiff who can make 50 yuan a day pulling down walls or 200 going down in a coal mine not knowing if he'll come back out, versus the handsome lady, Shen Hong (Zhao Tao) whose estranged building magnate husband she wants to divorce because she's found a younger man. She has options; Han Sanming is simply drifting and lonely. And in the background for both, though, is the enormous turbulence and activity in which we see both protagonists as tiny helpless figures, their own lives indeed "still life" by comparison.

There's another unexpected, astonishing sequence of a fat rock singer, naked from the waist up like most of the Three Gorges demolition workers Han Sanming encounters and drenched in sweat. He sings of nostalgia for his youth, a time when everybody was happy , and old men in the audience shed tears while garish go-go girls gyrate: where does this fit in? This is another symbol of social upheaval. But what is really happening? Won't Chinese society have to return to its heritage of Mao and the Eighties aftermath chronicled in another of Jia's unwieldy masterpieces, the 2000 Platform? Perhaps the titles Still Life ironically points to the way people are frozen in isolation (broken couples, estranged children) and unhappiness (or quiet desperation) in a China that all the rampant economic progress both masks and perpetuates.

After his colorful land pointed but somewhat leaden 2004 The World/Shijie Jia Zhang-Ke has shown again as in Platform and Unknown Pleasures that he can touch and astonish. The human events are dwarfed by capitalist Progress in the new China, but people (after all, they are a zillion of them there) are still very much in the foreground. \Still Life is an impressive, organic-feeling movie that refers to Jia's earlier films but, extraordinarily, seems to bring together both post-war Italian neo-realism and the desolate urban landscapes of Michelangelo Antonioni.

Antonioni's Blow-Up was the biggest hit of the Italian director's career, the superficial elements of the fashion world, Swinging London and orgies on purple paper ensuring its commercial success.

Models such as Veruschka (who appears in the film), Twiggy and fashion photographers at the time have complained about its unrealistic depiction of the industry and claimed that its central character, Thomas (played by the late David Hemmings) was clearly based on David Bailey.

To look at Blow-Up as an analysis of the fashion business in the Sixties is to misunderstand the film's intentions. In any case, when watching this film it may be difficult to tell what its all about if you're unfamiliar with Antonioni's films but it obviously has little to do with the fashion world which is merely the setting for the story and nothing more.

Antonioni made the clearest statement of his motivation as a filmmaker at the end of Beyond the Clouds when he talked about his belief that reality is unattainable as it is submerged by layers of images which are only versions of reality.

This is a rather pretentious way of saying that everyone perceives reality in their own way and ultimately see only what they want to see.

With this philosophy in mind, Blow-Up is probably Antonioni's most personal film.

Thomas' hollow, self-obsessed world is shattered when he discovers that he may have photographed a murder when casually taking pictures in a park. He encounters a mysterious woman, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave) who demands he hand over the film and when he refuses she appears at his studio, although Thomas never told her his address.

When the evidence disappears shortly afterwards, Blow-Up seems to deal in riddles that have no solution. Redgrave re-appears and then vanishes before the photographer's eyes, Thomas returns to the park without his camera and sees the body. The film concludes with Thomas, having discovered the body has disappeared, watching a group of mimes playing tennis without a ball or rackets in the park where the murder may have taken place.

It is only in the final scene of the film where the riddle is solved. Thomas throws the imaginary ball back into the court and watches the game resume. The look of realisation on his face is all too apparent as the game CAN BE HEARD taking place out of shot.

There is a ball, there are rackets and this is a real game of tennis. What we have seen up until this point is the photographer's perception of reality: the murder, the mysterious woman in the park, the photographic evidence and the body.

The following exchange between Hemmings and Redgrave is the key to the film:

Thomas: Don't let's spoil everything, we've only just met.

Jane: No, we haven't met. You've never seen me.

Winner of the Jury Award at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival but sadly banned in Iran, Jafar Panahi's Crimson Gold shows the growing chasm in Iran between rich and poor and the psychological effects of living under a regime based on fundamentalist religion. Written by famous Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami, it is based on a newspaper account of a similar incident that took place several years ago in Tehran. The film opens inside a jewelry store where a robbery is taking place. As a crowd gathers, the robber is trapped when the security system is released and the bars close over the front door. Flashbacks then show the events that led up to the crime and the film speculates as to what might have led to this act of desperation.

Hussein (Hossain Emadeddin), an alienated heavy set man who hides his emotions, is a pizza deliveryman in Tehran who takes cortisone shots to relieve the pain of injuries sustained in the Iran-Iraq War. He is engaged to be married to his friend Ali's (Kamyar Sheissi) sister but they communicate little. Ali is a thief who snatches women's purses but is an amateur bungler who rarely scores a big take. On examining the contents of a purse with Hussein at a restaurant, they discover the receipt for an expensive necklace and their fascination leads them to visit the jewelry store where it was purchased. When the owner refuses to let them in the store because of their dress, resentment boils.

Another incident reinforces this hurt. Hussein is forced by security police to wait outside a building as they arrest people attending a party for allegedly violating the social code of the regime that prohibits men and women from dancing together. Though he good-naturedly hands out pizzas to the police and the detainees waiting outside the building, he is upset at the manner in which he is treated. A bizarre final sequence raises Hussein's anger to the breaking point. He delivers a pizza to a lavish penthouse apartment where he is invited in by the wealthy tenant (Pourang Nakaheal), a young man who recently returned to Iran after staying with his parents in the U.S. The man, who appears to be lonely, talks incessantly, complaining about the "city of lunatics" he has returned to. As the young man chats on the cell phone, Hussein wanders through the house amazed at its affluence. He finds a rooftop swimming pool and jumps in fully clothed, then sits on the roof simply gazing at the city below. Fuming inwardly, the very next day he walks into the jewelry store with a loaded gun.

Crimson Gold bravely depicts the powerlessness of the individual in an authoritarian society, yet Hussein's emotional repressiveness and the telegraphing of the final outcome dilutes the film's tension, almost to the point of lethargy. To his credit, Panahi makes a strong statement but does not wallow in polemics, making it clear that the crime results from a combination of both social and psychological factors. Hussein is not an ordinary individual beaten down by the system but a walking time bomb, a man physically and mentally damaged by the war, uncommunicative, and humiliated by each slight, no matter how minor. Like Hussein, Panahi knows something about the feeling of being trapped and humiliated and his experience lends immediacy to the film. In 2001, the director was detained, then chained to a bench for ten hours because he refused to be fingerprinted and photographed by US authorities at JFK airport, a reminder that assaults upon human dignity are not limited to a single country.

Peter Greenaway is arty. Painfully so. However he readily admits that this film is "self-conscious", "manufactured" and he says that all cinema is probably as "artificial" a form as you can get.

This film is beautiful to look at. Greenaway was inspired, visually, by paintings of the mid 17th century, particularly those of Vermeer. Almost every shot is composed like a painting. Many of the shots are symmetrical, walls are filmed flat so that the horizontal lines are parallel with the top and bottom of the frame. Objects are placed on tables as if subjects for a still life. Lighting is used in an alternation of light, shade,light,shade receding to the back of the picture, which is a signature of the type of 17th century, Western art that Greenaway is paying homage to.

The substance of the film follows weighty themes, all of which are explained in great detail through the director's commentary: evolution, light and twin-ship.

What is lacking is emotion. This is a cerebral film. Your emotional reaction to it will be through the imagery, be it beautiful or repulsive. You will not engage with the characters on an emotional level. You'll find them hard to relate to. The performances are stilted and amateur theatrical. It is fortunate, then, that Michael Nyman provides a fantastic score (present on almost every scene and almost outstaying its welcome) which prevents the dialogue (the script leaves a lot to be desired too) rendering everything flat.

Rent this if you enjoy visuals for their own sake, if you wear spectacles and if you like holding your chin in your hand and frowning. I qualify on all those points, so I enjoyed it a great deal.

Extra points for an extraordinarily thorough director's commentary on the DVD which serves to pull out all the hidden depths. Though one could make the point that an explanation that adds so much extra understanding leaves you feeling that the film failed adequately to convey much of what was intended.

One of Greenaway's few genuinely warm films, despite its obvious morbidity. 'Drowning by Numbers' is frequently accused of misogyny, I can only assume because of the plot (three women 'revenge' themselves on their male significant others, etc.). This idea's a bit silly, considering how freely the male characters are satirized, but it's true that Greenaway has gender relations very much in mind here. The result is a kind of darker, art-film-ized version of 'The Importance of Being Earnest,' with the witty, nonsensical script and explicit references to games lulling us into Wildean amusement as we watch the Cissies quietly dispatch their menfolk one at a time. At least, for a while we're amused. Greenaway starts us off very much in the Cissies' corner; they are so likable, so recognizable to us, and their crimes are just the (admittedly unpleasant) means to their happiness . . . but before we know it, characters we care about start getting hurt. It's one thing when Cissie 1's drunken, philandering Jake goes, or Cissie 2's faithful but fat, priggish and inattentive Hardy does. But then Cissie 3's impatient but basically satisfactory Bellamy is done in (because he can't swim? really?), and soon we realize we no longer have the impulse to laugh. And when Madgett's story comes to its unhappy conclusion, or, even worse, when the children begin to imitate the adults' crazy behavior around the opposite sex (with horrific results), we see that Greenaway, ever the critic of humanity, is shaking his head sadly at sexual relations, not smiling at their folly. But he does it with such playfulness, and such a rich, loving cinematic texture--the season is fall, but the film is made summery by Michael Nyman's score and Sacha Vierny's cinematography--that 'Drowning by Numbers' is less a lecture than a game

This is something like a full-length episode of the Twilight Zone, popular at the time of the movie's release. It's cheaply made, the photography is grainy, the story basically simple, and the acting nothing to write home about -- but this is one effective film if you're into dread.

Candace Hilligoss is a pretty blonde with a sharp nose and a vulnerable quality about her. (She might remind the viewer of that Twilight Zone episode that starred Inger Stevens continually running into a guy in black, "The Hitch Hiker," maybe?) Candace Hilligoss is not a major actress but it's difficult to imagine a better fit between the individual and the role. She's pretty enough so that men might find it pleasant to stand next to her in the supermarket checkout line, but not too pretty. Her face is defined by its bone structure so that you can almost see the skull beneat the skin. Her slanted, over-sized blue eyes suggest some sort of startled prey animal. And her movements, her body language, are both clumsy and extremely feminine. She wobbles when she runs and minces when she walks. And she's the right age too -- thirtyish -- not a fledgling with a great big Future ahead of her. The successive loss of her friends, her home town, her job in Utah, her room in the boarding house, and eventually her car, is enough to leave anyone in a state of desperation -- especially someone whose sole marketable skill seems to be playing the organ.

The narrative has been gone over so I'll skip any description of it. What distinguishes this movie from others of its type is that, with the exception of the opening scenes of the accident at the bridge, there is no one at all who acts in a perfectly normal manner. (Unlike Inger Stevens, Hilligos has no ordinary sailor to pick up and talk to.) The pervading sense of disquiet is enhanced by the efficient use of locations -- a church, a vast ballroom, a decrepit and deserted amusement park at the end of a pier. And I think the performers contribute as well, their very amateurish awkwardness promoting in the viewer a feeling that "something" is not quite right about what we're witnessing. Even the scenes of quotidian life -- finding a job, fending off a neighbor's advances, trying to be polite to a polite landlady -- seem to be imbued with a kind of hard-to-define cockeyed quality. Hilligoss is living in a universe in which nothing, and nobody, has an identity whose validity can be taken for granted. Not even her psychiatrist can be trusted to be what he seems.

There are no big shock moments. Nobody gets slaughtered in a shower. Nothing is "evil" in any ordinary sense. Everything is simply "wrong." And the only music in the score is played on a church organ, mostly eerie chords that shimmer in the background. It's quietly done by director Herk Harvey.

Originally McElwee set out to make a documentary following the route General Sherman took during the Civil War and investigate the impact he had on the lives of people past and present who live there, but somehow he ended up marking the lives of past girlfriends and practically every other woman he meets on his journey, interwoven with occasional bits of history.

The film is quite funny in it's own way as well. Charleen, a former schoolteacher of him (if I remember correctly) contributes to some of the funniest moments. She continuously introduces Ross to girls from her seemingly inexhaustible stable of eligible women. One of them even is - without Charleen knowing it - a Mormon! And there's a hilarious subplot involving Burt Reynolds, who increasingly becomes McElwee's nemesis.

Somehow, this film taught me more about American culture, Southern sensitivities in particular, than most "historic" movies or documentaries combined. I know the Civil War is considered the single most important historic event in US history, but the conflict invoked quite a revolutionary step in the history of warfare as well. Sherman's campaign marked the first time in modern history that total warfare had been waged on a primarily civilian population, while his army raged the states of Georgia, South- and North Carolina, where approximately some 60,000 civilians alone perished in his path. But it's impact extends much further into the 21th century. The Civil War and especially the Confederate surrender and its aftermath, still seems a major factor in defining Southern identity.

Wisely, he trimmed the original title a bit, which he perhaps could have done with the movie itself, which is a bit long, 155 minutes, but it doesn't matter much, especially when watching it at home. At times it can get slow but you just have to settle with his own pace, rhythm and his unique cinematographic style and you will be rewarded. The conversations, the nuclear threat, the clothes and hairdos, it also makes a wonderful time capsule of the 80's. Combined with the occasional touch of history and the wonderful voice-over narration of Ross McElwee, this is a truly inspiring journey of almost epic proportions. Highly recommended.

It's useless to speculate on the "real" meaning of this dream-like movie that is an investigation on the mechanics of memory, and has the absolutely unique feature of allowing as many interpretations as there have been viewers since it opened to change cinematic grammar, decades ago. I've seen it 4 or 5 times over a span of some 25 years and still find it sumptuously directed, endlessly fascinating, eerie, one of my favorite movies of all time, and above all, an O-R-I-G-I-N-A-L !! Every movie ever made since "Marienbad" has a direct or indirect debt to it, as it abandoned (and subverted) objective story-telling tradition and entered the realm of total subjectivity, challenging movie audiences' intelligence, attention and perception. Of course, it's not meant for viewers who associate movies with light entertainment, though anyone who's ever wondered about his/her own mnemonic idiosyncrasies -- the diffuse, random, inaccurate way we recall facts and sometimes even mix them with imagined stuff -- surely COULD relate to this masterpiece.

There has been many conjectures as to the subject and the plot. Well, if you want a good hint, let me give you a precious one: read the novella "La Jalousie" (Jealousy, 1957), by Alain Robbe-Grillet, who is also the screenwriter of "Marienbad". "La Jalousie" is the thematic and "ideological" inspiration for "Marienbad".

Robbe-Grillet (one of the top names of the French "Nouveau Roman" movement along with Nathalie Sarraute, Marguerite Duras, Michel Butor, etc), was a former agronomist/ mathematician (and his writing shows it) who became a writer/filmmaker with a very personal, geometrical, unemotional, descriptive style. The novella "La Jalousie", like most Nouveau Roman books, is essentially cinematic in their approach of characters and plot, functioning like a film camera, a non-opinionated unobtrusive observer, but insightfully revealing in its "detachment".

His novella "La Jalousie" is a fascinating, maze-like circular construction, in which beginning and end mingle many times over, each time from a different perspective, just like observing a house or a sculpture from different angles one at a time -- which means each angle is only partially accurate, revealing but a portion of the truth, while hiding another. The "observer/narrator" in the book (the husband, but written in the third person - "he") tries to locate in PLACE and TIME the precise moment in which the feeling of jealousy arises in him as he tries to find the extent of his wife's relationship with another man (a.k.a. the threesome in the film). Did an affair really happen? Is it yet going to happen? Or is it his imagination, his suspicion, just his jealous feeling? (btw, this is the same theme as Proust's incomparable masterpiece "La Prisonnière", treated in antipodal, totally psychological, but equally obsessive style).

As in most "Nouveau Roman" novels, the notion of TIME in "La Jalousie" (and also in "Marienbad") is transformed and deformed; the approach of the characters is non-psychological, meaning that thoughts and outbursts of emotion are not dealt with, only the description of places, words, gestures and actions. Everything (even a very strong feeling like the birth of jealousy) is apprehended only through the observation of external facts: small gestures, the position of a chair or a table, a glass found full or empty, an unexpected sound, the way the woman combs her hair or looks at herself in the mirror, a suddenly unusual way of getting up or sitting down which leads to the husband's perception that something has suddenly, dangerously, definitely changed.

Well, it made very much sense to me that language-experimentalist book-worm Alain Resnais (think of all of his movies which were based on literature) and his fascination with memory and the brain (think "Hiroshima Mon Amour", "Je t'Aime Je t'Aime" and "Mon Oncle d'Amérique") should venture in constructing this film in visual terms using the geometrical structure of the novel (hence the breathtaking serpentine camera movements), with no beginning or end, respecting its "external", non-psychological, non-motivational approach of the characters and the plot, never condescending to "explanations".

See the film and read the book! I'm sure that, if you've liked (or been baffled by) the film on a first viewing, you'll have many insights on a second viewing of this absorbing, totally fascinating movie after reading the book on which it is structurally/esthetically based. While it's not essential to do so, it could be kind of a bonus! What else can I say? A definitive, revolutionary, undisputed film classic

Hiroshima is at the heart of this deceptively simple story. Hiroshima not only as the city which received the fatal bomb on the morning of August 9, 1945, at 9:15 AM, but Hiroshima as the city of Nevers which the woman tries to escape from (but ultimately can't), and Hiroshima as the Japanese man with whom she is having a clandestine affair. The tragedy of the past dresses and undresses them like the ashes seen at the beginning of the film, superimposed on the glistening sweat from the protagonists' lovemaking... an act that will not be repeated after, or throughout the movie. Theirs is an affair that will remain devoid of a fulfilling consummation.

We don't know much about these two people in the beginning: She (Emmanuelle Riva) is in Hiroshima filming scenes for an anti-war movie; he lost his family to the bombing and knows of the pain and the inconsolable loss. The Actress tells him (Eiji Okada) she knows of loss as well, and can identify. At first, we don't know what is under her skin, or why she calmly tells him there will be no more meetings, that he will go away. It is his staying, faithful, by her side, that causes her to slowly peel away at the layers of pain that have lingered just under the surface for 14 years now, eating at her, wanting some form of exorcism.

Rarely has there been such naked intimacy told or filmed on screen in such unconventional manner, de-glamorizing the actors, almost depersonalizing their egos, for the sake of telling a story that took place years ago, but is still present in her mind and soul and is still happening, in an endless repetition, over and over again. Being in Hiroshima only intensifies her grief and overall isolation. Knowing the affair must eventually end and that they will go back to their lives practically turns her to stone in one scene, as morning arrives.

Here is the real tragedy of the story: that we have come to care for both of these people, that they have somehow formed a bond that has been able to rise, like Hiroshima, from the ashes of the past, but that the isolation and inner torment that still rages prevents there being any simple solution -- no Hollywood ending where She will carry out her impulsive decision (that she makes one, to stay, is here, but only in desire, not action), and from what little we still know of Him, no statement that He will leave his unseen, unnamed wife. They will part, and her exclamation near the end: "I am forgetting you already!" is an act, a defense mechanism. She hasn't forgotten the incident at Nevers (which becomes her symbolic name at the end), nor will she forget this man whom at the end has named himself Hiroshima, in remembrance.

This classic horror-anthology from Britain's Ealing Studios is composed of four separate stories, composed around a group of strangers that is mysteriously gathered at a country estate where each reveals their chilling tale of the supernatural. But even after these frightening tales are told, does one final nightmare await them all?

The horror-anthology has proved a difficult sub-genre, usually made with only limited success, because it's notoriously difficult to get it right. If only one of the stories fails to deliver, the whole piece is dragged down. But this multi-part horror effort from Britain's Ealing Studios still proves to be very effective and justifiably still is one of the most revered and successful horror anthologies ever made. It features appearances by many of the best British actors of it's day, including Mervyn Johns, Ralph Michael, Basil Radford and Michael Redgrave. With four different directors at the helm, not all four segments are equally effective and are quite different in tone, but they are all good in their own right. The standout for me, not judged in terms of the best, but certainly the most frightening story of the four, is "The Ventriloquist Dummy" by Brazilian born Alberto Cavalcanti (he's simply billed as Cavalcanti), the only non-British director involved in DEAD OF NIGHT. Michael Redgrave plays a renowned ventriloquist who descends into an abyss of madness and murder, when his dummy takes on a life of his own. One of the most unsettling stories I've ever seen.

The somewhat less effective (if only slightly) mirror sequence by Robert Hamer shows something very scary can be achieved with very basic means. When Ralph Michael looks in the mirror, to his horror he keeps seeing the reflection of a dark Gothic room lit with candles, completely different from the room he's standing in and slowly, he begins to loose his mind. Ultimately, it is the extremely unsettling music score that makes it work. Basic but very effective.

As with most anthologies, it's difficult to keep track of the main interwoven storyline, because between the different stories we're told, your mind is still very much trying to grasp what you've just seen. This is probably why the genre became increasingly unpopular over the years. With the exception of "The Ventriloquist Dummy", don't expect anything particularly scary, but it did leave me quietly disturbed. The peerless British cast and the witty, slightly old-fashioned tongue-in-cheek dialog makes this very pleasant and appropriately unsettling viewing.

Critics have compared the visual style of this film with those of others from the same period, notably Spione (aka: Spies, 1928), Lang's most recent comparable social thriller. Testament is far more cluttered, its visual confusion suggesting moral complexity as well as the closing in of threatening events - both as far as the characters are concerned and, as it unfortunately turned out, for German society in general. In M, evil was detected in the presence of a murderous outsider, one eventually brought to book by a benign conspiracy of the underworld. Here there is a web of criminal activity and corruption from which no one is entirely immune, and in which many are driven by a murderous compulsion to obey an evil power. At the same time, Lang is happy enough to introduce into this world of social corruption elements of thrills and suspense, which spring from a much simpler world of serials and adventure stories. The near documentary feel of a lot of the film is interspersed with explosions, floods, chases and close escapes. In this way the sombre, far reaching criminalities of Mabuse's schemes, rooted in current socio-political unrest are counter-pointed with time honoured pleasures brought by crime melodrama. Lang had a weakness for this sort of drama: The Spiders Part II: The Diamond Ship (1920) contains a somewhat similar but much shorter, scene, where the hero is also trapped in a water filling room from which he escapes. It has been noted just how much of the action of Testament plays out like a dream, and in this sense it anticipates the disorientating mood which would characterise much of noir cinema of a few years later - of which the newly Americanised Lang would be a major exponent. Certainly the arch criminal mastermind of Mabuse has something in common with such later characters as, say Mike Lagana in The Big Heat (1953) although such figures in Lang's American period are far less omniscient. Once Hitler was out of the way, Lang increasingly saw the manipulation of human life as the province of fate rather than men, a view that had made its first ongoing appearance as far back as Der Müde Tod (Destiny, 1923). In Testament, some indeed appear pre-doomed by a nemesis stalking them, although this is largely placed in the human realm. Events play out like an unstoppable nightmare - a feeling reinforced by Mabuse's somnambulistic appearance as he constructs evil from his bed, the presence of ghosts, the unreality of the mysterious drama which unfolds and such scenes as the weird opening, its surreal use of factory sound anticipating the dark sound-scapes of Eraserhead (1978). By the end of Lang's film there is a sense that all have been involved in some grand combine of evil, and that the disorder and social chaos it presages has only just been forestalled - not by justice, but madness.

Modern viewers coming to Lang's film will find much to enjoy, even if some of the incidental elements have necessarily become a little dated. The editing and camerawork are excellent, and Rudolf Klein-Rogge's piercingly intense Mabuse is a memorable creation. Lohmann and the supporting cast are memorable characters, although the romantic interest between Kent and Lilly looks a little faded after all these years. It's a film in which special effects go hand in hand with suspense and the staging is still impressive. Amongst the most memorable scenes are those are the end with the destruction of the chemical factory and the expressionistic car chase back to the asylum. Most importantly, while the morally debilitating effects of the post-war German depression as well as the impending rise of adulatory Nazism have now passed into history, Lang's dramatisation of cause and effect remains as electric as ever in one of the finest films of his early sound career.

Santa Sangre is one weird movie, and I'm certainly not saying that as a bad thing! Surrealist cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky got the family together for this flick (Axel, Adan, Teo, Brontis) and, along with a bunch of unknown actors; has put together a film that stands alone as far as genre is concerned. The first thing you will notice about this film is that a lot of seemingly unrelated events take place. This bugged me a bit at first, until I realised where it was going; Jodorowski is excellent at putting his story together! This is my first taste of this man's work, but I already want to see more of it. The plot is a great base for a surrealist movie, and we follow a young circus boy who saves his mother from being bulldozed after she puts her life on the line to save her church, which is dedicated to some false deity. She takes offence to the leader of the circus and his activities with the voluptuous tattooed woman, and after interfering with the two of them; she finds herself armless. Some years later, she is thirsty for revenge...and needs the use of her son's arms to get it.

The first half of the film is interesting, but nothing more. The second half is where Santa Sangre really picks up, as Jodorowsky bombards the audience with a series of bizarre and beautiful incidents. The first knife killing is one of the bloodiest and most brutal I have ever seen; but the haunting scenes involving the son allowing the mother the use of his arms top even this in terms of merging beauty with horror. The idea behind the plot doesn't sound all that great; but the director ensures that it is once it gets on the screen. The only other film that I can compare this one to in terms of atmospheric beauty is the French masterpiece 'Eyes Without a Face' - and that is high praise indeed. Being a surrealist movie, some things appear to happen at random and don't make a lot of sense - but this is where the true brilliance of Jodorowsky's storytelling comes in. No matter how bizarre or weird this film gets - it can always be made sense of. Santa Sangre comes with huge recommendations to anyone that is a fan of wayward cinema. Haunting, beautiful, brutal and anything but cliché - do not miss this.

Warning. This is not a movie for an evening of entertainment. Its is 8 hours of surreal images about mass media combining with trivialized pop culture versions of German romantic irrationalizm to create that phenomenon called Hitler, which will never leave the dark corners of human nightmares and the strange world of pop mythology.

I've seen this film twice in a cinema (Berkeley, CA) when it came around. Obviously people willing to subject themselves to eight hours of surrealist images about Hitler as the Great Communicator (the original for you Reagan fans) are going to go in a bit prejudiced. I had not yet seen any other Syberberg films nor read anything about him or his films, as I wanted to experience this for it's own sake without preconceived notions. After intermission, my friend, a warehouse manager, and I couldn't wait to see the rest. The same was true when it returned a few years later and I saw it with an artist friend, who was even more excited. We heard similar buzz from the people around us at intermission. This movie was something special, and after all these years, having re-read the screenplay and amazed at the images, I'd see it again for an all nighter. But I don't really have to because I can replay most of the scenes in my head at any time -- they were that striking and memorable. I guess part of that may have to do with the fact that I am born German, and was once a student of modern German literature, theater, art and lived in Munich when artists like Handke, Thomas Bernhard, Max Frish, Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders and Syberberg challenged the status quo and awoke Germans to the idea that there is something else besides Brecht, Grass and sighing the Mea Culpa over the Third Reich.

Syberberg had already done films that were hard to get shown (this was before the Video Revolution) and with Hitler he really went overboard. This film could never be a commercial success, but it was worth the making and seeing. It creates images, meant for someone who is steeped in German mythos while at the same time aware of the changes wrought on world media by Edison's invention of the moving pictures. Combine these with mass communication capability, the capability to entrance the masses with the images they want to identify with is the history of both Hitler and Movies. So for eight hours Syberberg bombards the viewer with images of the Black Mary (Edison's studio) as a backdrop, Hitler rising out of Wagners grave in a Roman toga, Radio tranmissions of SS Troopers singing Silent Night direct from Stalingrad, touching personal reminiscances by Hitler's butler of how he liked his underwear pressed, his projectionist eating a sausage picknick at the old Eagle's Nest talking about what a nice regular guy his old boss was.

In short, this movie fills the viewer with indellible images of the capability of mass media to suck in the viewers, give them a sense of intimacy, and trivialize mass murder from a "real life human perspective." No single scene or sermon or 90 minute expose of Auschwitz can ever hope to drive home the real insanity of the mass delusions which created the greatest tragedy of this century. And for Germans the constant cleansing and coping escapism of the post war era (It wasn't us, it was those few bad guys that are now dead) needed a real response by the generation that was born afterwards. And the only way Syberberg could do that was to let all those images of the collective German memory of the great history of its irrationalism and romanticism fight against the attempt to rationalize it's rape by their own philestines.

Done four-years before Models (1999), this is another of director Ulrich Seidl's (Jesus, You Know) submersions into Austrian-subculture, as well as a testament to the modern-crisis of isolation and solitude. The real people Seidl located for this film are on the margins of Austrian-society, which is a little different for him. Rather than his usual suburban and urban-subjects, he goes for people who are the forgotten of Austria. It could be anywhere: A pair of homeless young-men (whom I pity), an aged bourgeois- bachelorette and her unwholesome-relationship with her dog, two elderly men living in a high-rise tenement and their dog, and so-on. There is a silent-tragedy in the lives of these people that has made them shun people, and filling that hole with their pets. From there, it can get weird.

Nobody in Animal Love is a glamour-puss, but the people are remarkable for their ordinary-qualities--something you don't often see in films these-days. Somehow, by elevating-beauty, we have made the 'ordinary' extraordinary. 'Liebe' begins with a series of simple-tableaux of the owners and their pets. But before we know it, many of the owners begin 'begging-the-question' as to why they are so close to their animal-companions: problems with past-relationships, and a general-disenchantment with people and society. Of course, much of this is from simple-inequality, the press of humanity, and how the workplace structures our lives. The forces that have shaped people in Seidl's documentaries are almost always absent or invisible. He should come to America sometime, he would find more-acute cases of estrangement. Americans are certainly overworked compared to the continental European-model. But, in some cases, it's just broken-lives of people who would be messed-up in a utopia, and this is the fodder of all good drama. Many of the people in this documentary are very-very poor and isolated because of their social-status. This sometimes gives the film the feel of Dickens, but it is instructive and fascinating nonetheless.

The skinny, older Austrian-man has a very interesting series-of-observations about contemporary-life in our modern, and regimented world. It is a general existentialist-position: He correctly-proposes that people become neurotic like animals that are caged because of all the rules and laws that widely confine-us. It is an interesting comment on why the men have their dog, and is underscored when we see them arguing over petty-things. Ironically, the dog attacks the smaller-dog of a woman on a walk outside of their flat, and it just underlines how alienated people are nowadays. Seidl's passionless-gaze on these lives expresses how brutal and cold our world is, and that much of it is natural. Not even the commonality of having-dogs helps these people transcend and communicate with each other. It's an unfortunate moment for everyone.

One has to face the fact that when you can no-longer imagine anything-else but your routine, you have become conquered. Many people simply don't note this consciously, and they become peculiar in their behaviors. This is a dangerous state to be in. At some point, it leeches-into the culture, and you know an unhappy-one when you see it. Just watch five-minutes of American television, and you tell me we have a 'happy' culture. I'm sure the same can be said for Austria, France, or Germany, as well. Look at Japanese cinema--is it happy? Every politician and businessman in the developed world should watch Seidl's films, so as to see where we are all heading. It would also be a good-lesson for architects and city-planners, so they can make environments people can actually live in. The problem: this situation is to-their-advantage, so the only-solution is to replace-them.

Some of these relationships with the animals in Animal Love definitely border-on bestiality, but Seidl spares us this, at-least; but not much-else. The thin man's discourse on 'too-many rules' and caged-animals hinges-on-this: Are the pets being caged? Or is it the owners? Has modern life been more fully-engineered as a 'trap' than we would care to admit? The viewer has to decide this for themselves, and there are no-explanations, or any need for them. Digging this deeply is what makes Ulrich Seidl the most subversive documentarian alive today, he has no-peer (maybe Herzog). Do not miss any of his films if you value the truth. Werner Herzog's review/statement on this film is spot-on. Not to be missed, and not so depressing as one might think. It beats doing the peeping-Tom routine!

This film has got to be ranked as one of the most disturbing and arresting films in years. It is one of the few films, perhaps the only one, that actually gave me shivers: not even Pasolini´s Sálo, to which this film bears comparison, affected me like that. I saw echoes in the film from filmmakers like Pasolini, Fassbinder and others. I had to ask myself, what was it about the film that made me feel like I did? I think the answer would be that I was watching a horror film, but one that defies or even reverses the conventions of said genre. Typically, in a horror film, horrible and frightening things will happen, but on the margins of civilized society: abandoned houses, deserted hotels, castles, churchyards, morgues etc. This handling of the subject in horror is, I think, a sort of defence mechanism, a principle of darkness and opacity functioning as a sort of projective space for the desires and fears of the viewer. So, from this perspective, Hundstage is not a horror film; it takes place in a perfectly normal society, and so doesn´t dabble in the histrionics of the horror film. But what you see is the displacement of certain key thematics from the horror genre, especially concerning the body and its violation, the stages of fright and torture it can be put through. What Seidl does is to use the settings of an everyday, middle class society as a stage on which is relayed a repetitious play of sexual aggression, loneliness, lack and violation of intimacy and integrity: precisely the themes you would find in horror, but subjected to a principle of light and transparency from which there is no escape. It is precisely within this displacement that the power of Seidl´s film resides. Hundstage deals with these matters as a function of the everyday, displays them in quotidian repetition, rather than as sites of extremity and catharsis - a move you would encounter in said horror genre. One important point of reference here is Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Fassbinder also had a way of blending the political with the personal in his films, a tactics of the melodrama that allowed him to deal in a serious and even moral way with political issues like racism, domination, desire, questions concerning ownership, sexual property and control, fascism and capitalism etc. Seidl´s tactic of making the mechanisms of everyday society the subject of his film puts him in close proximity with Fassbinder; like this German ally, he has a sort of political vision of society that he feels it is his responsibility to put forward in his films. During a seminar at the Gothenburg Film Festival this year, at which Seidl was a guest, he was asked why he would have so many instances of violated, subjugated women in Hundstage, but no instances of a woman fighting back, liberating herself. Seidl replied that some may view it as immoral to show violence against women, but that he himself felt it would be immoral not to show it.

"The Memory of a Killer (De Zaak Alzheimer)" is a sophisticated synthesis of several genres into a stylish thriller. There's the opening shots of a steam engine, saluting European film noir contrasting with the sharp sunlight of corrupt Marseille; the Georges Simenon-like police investigation contemporized with gritty Brit mystery crimes and the hunky bantering buddy cops where one is a wild rule-breaker and his boss is an Eliot Ness straight arrow; the samurai code of honor; the Western where the old gunslinger takes on one last conflict, like "The Unforgiven" and already adapted to "Man on the Train (L'Homme du Train)"; a revenge showdown, like the recent "Four Brothers"; the memory stream of consciousness tricks of "Memento" and the snappy editing of Hong Kong crime thrillers like "Infernal Affairs (Wu jian dao)." And we even get a "The Sopranos"-like psychological profile of a hit man.

While director Erik Van Looy smoothly integrates all these elements together in adapting what must have been a complex novel, this is terrific, intelligent popular entertainment and only its subtitles keep it in limited release in the U.S. in art houses. Too bad a Hollywood adaptation is inevitable.

The film has an exciting dual structure of following the cops and the criminal as they get intertwined and chase each other, as each sorts out vengeance and some justice (with surprising collateral damage) ever higher up the responsibility ladder so that our sympathies, and theirs, are compromised. While we atypically don't see anything of the cops' personal lives (except with an amusing visual twist that it's the guy in the shower), we do get thrust into their quite believable bureaucratic and legal wranglings, which, while a bit confusing for an American audience, can be inferred to be similar to the jurisdictional conflicts between local police departments and the FBI that we've seen in plenty of movies and TV shows. The English subtitles seem pretty good at communicating the localisms, though some of the cultural conflict in Belgium between French and Flemish speakers is lost, particularly when it is significant which language is being spoken.

The twist that is given away in the original title of the film, translated as "The Alzheimer Affair," is that the highly intelligent and perceptive criminal, the charismatic Jan Decleir, realizes he is losing his memory, and sees his near future clearly in his hospitalized brother. We get inside his head as he is trying to out race not only the cops, his traitorous client and duplicitous boss, but himself, so that his taunt of "too slow" takes on a double meaning. His professionalism takes over even when the flashy cinematography indicates he doesn't quite remember what he's done.

While the body count is high, the violence is one on one and is not gratuitous. Each death ratchets up the tensions and complications as what at first seems street level crime has cynical political implications. Much of the film takes place in the dark, like "Collateral," and while there's a fair amount of sudden coming up from behind scares, that's usually the start of a suspenseful scene where cat and mouse decisions ricochet off in surprising ways.

The music very effectively supports the action, particularly when the story continues in an unexpected direction, though the choice of a Starsailor song over the credits didn't seem to fit.

ow is it possible for a boy, whose parents are devoid of normal humanity, to grow up to be loved and respected? The film, Character, presents a credible demonstration. It has the darkness of Ingmar Bergman or Charles Dickens, is slow-moving, thoroughly engrossing and it left me emotionally drained, which always elicits a high rating from me.

Dreverhaven is apparently an evil man: a bailiff who is quite willing to evict people in a terrible storm. He embodies two Nietzschean concepts: 1. the will to power (he entered into power struggles with anyone whom he felt he could dominate) and 2. that a life becomes better by becoming stronger through adversity (he did everything in his power to bring adversity to his son, believing that that would strengthen him--and in many ways it did). His internal struggle between the will to power over his son and his desire to strengthen him is the prime mover of the film; his son's reactions to that are the core. Dreverhaven is also totally fearless; the question arises whether it is caused by bravery or just being tired of life.

The film opens with his son, Jacob Katadreuffe (Fedja van Huêt), coming home, all bloody, only to be arrested as a suspect in the murder of Dreverhaven. He then tells the two interrogators a most amazing story. Since he is describing his own life, one might suspect that he is embellishing the story in his own favour but I believe that he was totally candid.

The story is too complex to dwell on but certain aspects must be mentioned. Jacob's mother, Joba (Betty Schuurman), was a servant to Dreverhaven. On one and only one occasion he may have raped her: it is not made clear if she resisted. As soon as she discovered that she was pregnant, she left him and tried to sever all ties. For a long time, however, Dreverhaven repeatedly proposed marriage and was refused. His motivation is ambiguous (propriety or affection) and Joba was apparently determined not to allow Dreverhaven to beat her in a power struggle.

Because of his Mother's silence, young Jacob believed that she did not like him and, being a pariah because he was illegitimate, he turned to books for solace. Through this he developed a love of learning and a willingness to work hard and he advanced rapidly in a law firm, winning the respect and admiration of most of his colleagues, especially De Gankelaar (Victor Löw), who hired him. De Gankelaar, a man with a huge underbite and a heart to match, became Jacob's mentor, adviser and protector.

Denied access to his son, Dreverhaven began a game of terror against Jacob through legal channels.

The film is a study of character and characters. Their motivations are subtly hidden by consistent and superb acting. In my attempts to understand this dysfunctional family (if it can be called a family) I was forced to think. The slow movement allowed time for that. I want to see the film again, expecting that each viewing will bring a closer understanding. Even the evil Dreverhaven was more an object of pity rather than despicable; his actions were caused more by ignorance of human sensitivities, a dogmatic respect for the law and an unusual philosophy rather than by malice. The film is open-ended. What will Jacob do with the rest of his life?

The Inheritance is the dramatic tale of Christoffer (Ulrich Thomsen), a successful restauranteur whose father dies, leaving him the family's steelworks in his will. Christoffer and his young wife Maria (Lisa Werlinder) are torn away from the city as Christoffer begins the difficult task of pulling the steelworks out of a financial slump. It is a burden that will ultimately lead to years of pent up frustration exploding in a dizzy and spellbinding fury that will decide what path Christoffer chooses to take.

The Inheritance is filmed in the rough, gritty, digital style seen before in Open Water, the grainy print complimenting the industrial symbolism that has melted comfortably into the story line. Christoffer is seen through windows in moments of reflection, the glass acting almost as a barrier between Christoffer's repression of feeling and his desire to explode, which he eventually does - shattering a glass coffee table and screaming. The glass mirrors Christoffer's personality, two characters, at different times during the film, label him "as cold as ice". His deadened character is set well against the muted colours that make up the metallic mise-en-scene.

The film is straining for realism throughout. The characters exchange dialogue that suffers for its honesty, especially in the scene in which Christoffer confronts his wife over her cheating on him: the words are boringly familiar, cliché beyond being bearable, and the film suffers for it. This does not remove any credit from the actors, Ulrich Thomsen and Ghita Nørby (as Christoffer's iron willed mother) in particular, who give realistic and where appropriate, emotionally driven performances. The quality of the acting is allowed to ferment by the director's decision to shoot using two cameras during the scenes, both of which were filming through a long focal lens, meaning that the cameras did not need to be up close to the actors. This freedom allows improvisation to reign unrestricted, and the film both succeeds and suffers for the numbingly boring realism that this creates.

The story starts out as a relatively normal one about a bank clerk who averts a bank robbery, mostly by chance, is interviewed on national telivision, yet somehow still manages to bore his girlfriend enough for her to dump him, all in the same day. It then takes a surreal twist as the wife of the now jailed bank robber barges into his apartment and gives him a guilt trip about why he couldn't just have let the bank robber take the money so she could get the expensive operation she needs for them to be able to have a much-wanted baby. The bank clerk is mightily confused by all this, and approaches his criminal brother with ideas of robbing one of the bank's cash-transport vehicles (in a rather special way) and helping the bank robber of of jail in order to reunite them and make things well again.

This is when one discovers the true nature of the film.

The bank clerk's brother is basically a complete psycho with his own very special right/wrong codex (at one point he tells us how in China it is ok to eat dogs, and that it's up to oneself what is right and wrong - hence the title). As things progress, it becomes clear the movie is quite un-serious, and it becomes very easy to just sit back and enjoy the bizarre and often twisted situations that arise.

Two young chain-smoking chefs working for the criminal brother deliver the much-needed comical relief, responding to the brother's orders of dumping yet another corpse out in the Danish marsh with lines like "But.. but we're just cooks"!

It is impossible to really do the movie justice with any form of narration. Much of the action would sound very disturbing if retold, but when seen along with the characters' expressions and in light of the whole movie, including the refreshingly unexpected ending, it is hard to take very seriously.

The dialogue of the movie, reminiscent of classics like Pulp Fiction and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, is what really shines through. As the story unfolds and becomes more and more far-fetched, each line of dialogue becomes a stand-alone punchline in as of itself, leaving most audiences (at least the ones I've been with) roaring with laughter.

Odd Man Out is an almost flawless movie that is such a tribute to great acting, writing, and storytelling. In a time when there are so many blow em' up action movies with actors showing the talent levels of my radio this movie can show you that there can indeed be great films that don't involve huge explosions, and that much gunplay, and also this movie proves that so much of a story can develop within a five mile radius, if not that big, and show you just how intense human drama can be. James Mason, in one of his best performances ever plays Johnny McQueen, an IRA member who is hunted by the law. After he is shot his friends seek help, having to leave him alone, in order to find someone that will help him. He must run after the cops almost find him. What ensues is a movie that is not pro-IRA or pro-Britain but an incredible character-driven movie in a movie you would not expect to find one. The movie takes place all over the city, as Johnny McQueen and all of those associated with him have an incredible adventure, not to mention his love interest. The acting is beyond phenomenal, these actors give these characters a great amount of depth, and they seem to realize the backdrop of the conflict at hand, and play the scenario perfectly.

This time does not exist anymore, the conflict of which this movie takes place in might, but fifty years later attitudes, traditions, and conventions of the day have changed a lot. This movie is almost an incredible time capsule, capturing the feeling of the time, and the conflict of the time without telling any names, you know the organization that the movie is talking about but no name is mentioned, and a name really doesn't need to be mentioned. This movie is all around phenomenal, in the message it conveys, and the way it conveys it. Odd Man Out uses this conflict to portray an idea of peace, an idea to stop killing, and to stop violence. In this film the movie lends the conflict to senselessness, by the end of the film the goals of both sides seem like a moot point, and that all that happened as a result of the conflict was a lot of violence, murder, turmoil, and nothing achieved. I cannot say enough that the one key to the success of the film is the acting. James Mason is in top form as the gunman that wonders around the unnamed town, the supporting cast is nothing short of spectacular, the acting makes this movie.

By some critics this was called the best British movie in the Post World War 2 era, for a number of years. In the immediate years following the war that is hard to debate, odd man out is quite a spectacle, a phenomenal film without question. The movie is so many things: a great character study, a brilliant film exploring man's own problems with it's own kind, a sad movie, a love story, and a movie that exemplifies the way movies should be made, obviously I give this movie a glowing endorsement. Many people say that movies in this time had shallow characters, that were unoriginal, and unrealistic. This movie shows just the opposite, and if you were to watch most mainstream movies today you would find that accusation true of most modern movies, but this movie shows just how strange, and sometimes remarkable we are, and shows very mush, in it's own way how different we are, and I love movies like this where the characters are what make the movie, the plot is important too, but it is the unique and unexpected characters that make this movie so much more than a standard movie, this movie is a classic. This is a movie that is almost mesmerizing, engrossing to the point you almost forget where you are, few movies achieve that, this is definitely an achievement for British cinema, and an achievement for cinema overall.

This was one of the first of its kind; a subtlety scary vision of a secret alien takeover. X-FILES may owe a debt to this low-budget, but nevertheless effective film of the powers-that-be who are conspiring with the invaders, and one lone, determined scientist who accidentally uncovers the sinister plot.

QUATERMASS II (U.S. title: ENEMY FROM SPACE) was produced before INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS, the film it is often compared to, due to their thematic similarities (loss of identity, social oppression, dangers of conformity, and blind allegiance to a greatly questionable, authoritarian power). However, it was released in the U.S. shortly after BODY SNATCHERS, probably making it look like a copycat to some.

Superb writer Nigel Kneale (excellent script, highly original for its time, derived from the earlier BBC serial) was known to strongly despise Brian Donleavy's gruff performance as the lead character. Kneale did not like the fact that Donleavy presented the character as a cold, methodical misanthrope who treats his colleagues like expendable underlings. He will probably want to boil me in oil for saying this, but I felt that presenting the lead character as morally ambivalent and ethically questionable jettisoned the standard 50's scientist/hero sterotype (for once he is not nice and charming). It also added a further degree of tension to the well-plotted story. In many ways, his alienated character is somewhat alien; perhaps that's the only true way to resist social pressures and conditioning. The allegory here is strong.

As the story opens, Quatermass is driving one night on a remote country road. He is furious that the stodgy Whitehall bureaucrats rejected his funding request for a proposed moon colonization project. A speeding car nearly hits him head-on as it runs off the road. The shaken passengers are a frightened woman and her boyfriend, who is in a crazed state, and has a strange black mark on his face.

Quatermass returns to his isolated lab, where radar reveals to his assistants that many small meteor particles (at least that's what they assume they are) have descended over a rural village known as Wynerton Flats.

Going out there with his colleague, Marsh, they first discover his moon project, fully constructed, and some small, mysterious rocks. As Marsh examines one, it emits an eerie gas and pops in his face, leaving the weird black mark. Strange soldiers arrive, behaving like aloof zombies, abduct Marsh, strong-arm Quatermass in the typical fascist tradition, and order him to leave. (There may be one flaw here: Why didn't the "soldiers" either abduct or kill Quatermass, instead of letting him go, so he can inform?)

Naturally the authorities all have tight lips about the secret activities at Wynerton Flats, but Quatermass manages to convince a few officials to go out there with him. A government aid (with that strange black mark on his wrist) conducts a formal tour of the plant, where everything seems to be normal. Not so. The small group is indoctrinated by the zombies (who resemble Nazis), but Quatermass manages to escape.

(This scene truly exposes Donleavy's ruthless side: He and a woman are taken into a large dome, but Quatermass flees, leaving the woman behind, without any concern for her fate. Hell, he doesn't even abide by the old fifties hero tradition by risking his life to save the distressed damsel. In many ways Quatermass was an ahead-of-his-time anti-hero. I always felt that this added a disquieting strength to the drama and the severity of the dire situation, but I guess that Kneale will still vehemently disagree).

I'll stop here, but don't worry, the worse is still to come. The sense of growing unease and mounting terror (strong qualities of your finer British Science Fiction at that time) escalates. Be patient, for it does carefully build into a total state of alarm, as Quatermass and the local angered citizens challenge the invaders (who have taken over most of the government and military officials) to a brutal showdown. There is something highly menacing in those domes.

This impressive film is true Science Fiction at its best. It thrills without pandering and is thoughtful to the point of disturbing. You can't trust anyone. Its social and political implications are definitely troubling. This is not for your Lucas and Spielberg crowd, for we're not talking about commercial catering to eight-year-olds. Val Guest directs in a cold, cynical Kubrickian manner, accentuating the high degree of paranoia, and the picture's black & white photography conveys a bleak, creepy mood. (Sorry, no pretty pictures here). The intriguing story takes on true nightmarish proportions.

The few effects won't win any CGI awards (don't forget, computers weren't around then) but the briefly glimpsed monster (in the gothic Lovecraft tradition) is quite sickening. After all, it can manipulate man's dirty politics, you can't get more reprehensible than that.

From the late sixties to the late eighties this film was unavailable to the public, and it was feared to be permanently lost, but it later was released on video and shown occasionally on the Science Fiction Channel. Many notable Science Fiction and Horror authors (I believe that Harlan Ellison and Stephen King were among them) have championed this small, but remarkable early Hammer production. This is the film that many others have "borrowed from." Just a polite way of saying RIPPED-OFF!

FROM THE EDGE OF THE CITY, Greece's official submission for the best Foreign Film Oscar, is a multi-layered film that can likewise appeal to many spheres of society. In (homophobic?) Greece, it has been viewed as a serious study of urban angst, involving immigrant Russian Greeks avoiding any mention of the film's overkill gay content. Nevertheless, it has been a box-office success, though mainstream Greece dares not mention one of the reasons for the success is the (paid) love that likewise dares not mention its name. In contrast, the film's international exposure up to now, prior to the Oscar nominations, has been almost exclusively at International Gay Film Festivals: San Francisco and, particularly Verzaubert, which tours Germany's largest cities, including Berlin where I saw it. The American-accented openly gay director of the film (one of the few Greek professionals who has dared come out of the closet) made a point of explaining this to the all-male sold-out crowd in Berlin in late November. He made the movie as a labor of love; out of his fixation on the leading character, which, like the rest of the cast, are not professional actors, just real Russian-Greek immigrant youth. These guys' desperate quest to get ahead in the European Union's consumer-driven society leads them to crime, including male prostitution, though they themselves exploit female prostitutes. Add to those conflicts, the homoerotic overtones of these teenage guys' physical contacts, realization and open discussion of their lives as homosexual prostitutes, and the film exceeds any definition of a gay film. This is very clear. That notwithstanding, many will continue to be in denial of this, and look at the film as social commentary, as an immigration tragedy, as a generational-conflict movie. Indeed, this movie can be many things to many people.

A German ballet school for girls is the setting for mysterious deaths, in this 1977 horror story, written and directed by Dario Argento. "Suspiria" is a visually stunning film.

The images contain objects we recognize, like people, buildings, and interior decor. But the objects seem vaguely menacing, and less real than surreal, as though they symbolize ideas, repressed desires, or subconscious fears. The vivid, rich colors, strange camera angles, deep shadows, and bright light piercing through darkness, all contribute to the impression that the viewer is trapped in someone else's nightmare.

One haunting segment of the film takes place in a huge, and strangely empty, public square, at night. A blind man and his German shepherd dog stand in the middle of the square, surrounded by imposing buildings of neo-classical architectural style. Some professional reviewers of this film have suggested that the public square is a veiled reference to Hitler and Nazism. Indeed, one could argue that the film's subtext is an indictment of fascism.

"Suspiria" is not for everyone. It is unsettling, and at times grisly. The plot is weak, and plot elements are not really explained. The acting is largely irrelevant. And while the background music is suitably gothic, it is also frantic and monotonous.

The best approach to this "art-house" film is to ignore the superficial plot, and focus instead on the fabulous cinematography, and the gothic images as conceptual metap

"Deutschland, bleiche Mutter" is a very bleak movie, more interesting as a document of the generation born around the war years than of the war years themselves. If that's what you're looking for, you have struck gold. Otherwise be warned, it is not a movie for the easily depressed (or easily bored, for that matter).It is an excellnt display of how war can separate people that were in love and enstrange them completely.

The movie opens with decadent pictures of masturbation and bestiality, but the film itself isn't that offensive. It's often very funny, and some of the things we see are just wrong, so how could it possibly be offensive? It'd have to be bad to be offensive, and this is spectacular. The story itself concerns a handful of people who have a connection in one way or another -- a fat woman, who lives next door to a bearded man, who buys porn from a beady-eyed man; the mailwoman who delivers to the bearded man, and the mustached man seen by the bearded man in an antique shop. The movie is filled with deliciously gooey sexual symbolism and would make an interesting double bill with "Crash." (Though unfortunately for a film so concerned with the odd things that we see, the film itself has got that dull, brown look to it that seems common with European productions.)

The film is dialogue free, and there's an especially good use of music and sound effects to more than make up for it (we can almost experience tactilely their sense of pleasure, the ecstasy of the mustached man who massages and prickles his wet, hairy skin with various types of bristled brushes); it's better that it's silent, because it gives a fuller feeling of the audience as voyeurs peeping in on these individuals' various sexual exploits, who create objects that satisfy their needs. There are some scenes that are just...the weirdest things I think I've ever seen, or at least certainly up there: a woman rolling up pieces of bread between her fingers and then snorting them up her nose later on in the picture. Or my favorite, the climactic scene with the bearded man dressed as a rooster, with umbrellas for wings, attacking a dummy made to look like that female neighbor. (She herself has her own dummy made in his image that she uses for S&M enactments.) But more than just surrealism -- and this is pretty surreal (meaning that it's real but bent) -- it makes a pretty powerful statement on the dullness of home life, whether you're single or paired off

An unemployed - but intelligent - social misfit goes on the run to London following a back alley rape, but finds The Capital just as desperate and alienating as his native Manchester.

This is one of the hardest films I have ever had to review. Topics such as urban alienation, career-choice unemployment, leeching, homelessness, drug taking and sexual violence would normally send me running for cover; but what we have here is so well constructed and so skilfully acted that it transcends it own headline topics.

This is a classic case of car-wreck film making: You don't praise or celebrate much, yet it is deeply fascinating and even hypnotic. People are tap dancing on the edge of a metaphorical cliff - some are there of there of their own free will.

Director Mike Leigh's semi-improvisational style doesn't always work, but here it really delivers something unique. You feel that you are watching real life even though too much happens in too short a time period for that to be the case.

This is a wandering odyssey film and features a central performance - by David Thewlis - that ranks along the best ever witnessed in cinema. How the Oscar people could have (totally) turned their back on a performance as a good as this puzzles; although the film and actor won prizes in Cannes and New York.

This is the first film I have ever seen that takes on sexual coercion in a head on fashion. People that have put themselves in a chemical or social situation where someone has something over them. The greasy upper crust landlord (Greg Cruttwell) might seem over-the-top to many but I know a few people actually like that!

(For the record his actions would be deemed illegal in real life - if you have seen the film.)

What happens to the on-screen people the day after this film ends? Has anything really changed? For Johnny - our central anti-hero - it will be just another day to duck and dive, avoid all work and wind people up using his extensive back reading.

Fragile Carne, just before his great period. Although it is sometimes hesitantly directed, and marred by longueurs, HOTEL DU NORD is full of the faded charm and beauty typical of French films of the late 1930s, as well as a relative lightness of touch unusual with this director. All of his great virtues are here: the cramped interiors broken up by gliding, complex, delicious camera movements; a melancholy deployment of light and shade; remarkable, wistful sets by Alexander Trauner, which are so evocative that they, as the title suggests, take on a shaping personality of their own; the quietly mournful music of Maurice Jaubert; a seemingly casual plot about romance, tragedy and fatalism that casts a noose over its characters; extraordinary performances by some of the greatest players of all time, in this case Louis Jouvet and Arletty.

In fact, the film's biggest failing, and I find myself astonished (as someone who usually, didactically, minimises its importance) to admit it, is its script. It has plenty of wit and poignancy, but without the poetry and irony regular Carne collaborator Jacques Prevert brought to their best films, it cannot avoid slipping into cliche (even if it is only cliche in hindsight).

Ostensibly set in the boarding house, the film sets up its opening idea of community with two interconnecting tales of doomed love, and emotional, metaphysical and actual isolation The doomed love scenario is the one that works least well. Annabella is very beautiful, but not very good at doing tragic, while Aumont's callowness, brilliantly appropriate though it may be, by its nature obtrudes any real, felt, romance. Maybe it's just me, but I find it hard to sympathise with a couple, so young, so attractive, who, after only a few months, are so racked with despair that they have to shoot each other. Their high-flown lines are rather embarrassing too. Of course, this affair is not meant to be plausible - they are symbolic of youth, hope and possibility being crushed in France, or maybe France itself, despairing, resigned, waiting for death. For symbols to be truly powerful, they must convince on a narrative level, which, I feel, they don't quite here.

What saves this plot is its connection with the story of M. Edmond, a character linked to the great tradition of French gangsters. Although we only learn it gradually, he is a killer in hiding, living off the prostitute played by Arletty, having dobbed in his accomplices. In his previous 'role' - and the theatricality of his position is crucial - he had one set of traits; in hiding he has assumed their complete opposite. Living a rather aimless life, he is profoundly shaken by the lovers' pact, and becomes fatalistic, realising the folly of trying to cheat death.

In this way - the admission that one is less a person than a collection of signs, and that death is an unavoidable reality the most powerful masculinity must succumb to - Edmond is like a romantic prototype of Melville's clinical killers. With one exception - he gives briefly into hope, a delusion which only strenghtens - if that's not too much of an unbearable irony - his fatal resolve.

All this could have been trite if it wasn't for the truly amazing performance of Louis Jouvet. I had studied his theatrical work at college, but this was my first taste of his screen talents, and he reveals himself to be worthy of the greats - Grant, Mastroianni, Clift, Mason, Mitchum, Cotten - giving a quiet nobility to a role which is more of a conception (he, needless to say, is allegorical too) than an actual person. Edmond begins the film a minor supporting character, but emerges as a tragic hero of some force. Like all those major actors, Jouvet's brilliance lies in what he conceals.

On a formal level, what amazes is Carne's grasping, ten years before its flourishing, of the techniques of the great Hollywood melodramas of Sirk, Ophuls, Ray and Minnelli. Although his theatricality lacks the fluidity and clear-eyed beauty of Sierck's contemporary German melodramas (check out the masterpieces ZU NEUEN UFERN and LA HABENERA), Carne's style truly fits his theme - that of entrapment, paralysis, resignation.

The film's principle motif is that of water - the credits float and dissolve, the hotel stands by a waterway - but instead of Renoir's open river of possibility, we have a canal, stagnant and manmade, going nowhere. The film begins as it ends, and the setting never changes, except for one brief interlude from which both escapees are doomed to return. Characters can only escape through death - their entrapment is emphasised by the narrow rooms they occupy, the walls and frames that hold them captive, the windows that look out on an escape they can never achieve.

The ethics of capitalism are figured in architecture, in the way people compartmentalise and miniaturise their lives, the way they treat other humans, the mechanical way they move. The film's look is updated Kafka - the nightmarish bureaucracy, the endless corridors, where the individual is arbitrarily humiliated, furtively watched by a frightened audience behind adjacent doors. The recurrent motif of the film, besides the endless triangles, is of frames - there is not a single composition that doesn't give onto other frames: windows, doorways, corridors, elevators, streets, etc. - like a kaleidoscope, the mere switching on of a light can radically reconfigure these spatial arrangements. This might seem to open up a very claustrophobic world, suggesting another world beyond the rigid frame we watch; rather, it creates a hall of mirrors effect, one world reflecting itself, in a whole city, society, culture - a never-ending repetition of the same lifeless tableaux that comprise this way of life; a prison literalised in the infantilising case of the senile military commander.

Because this way of life is made to seem natural, feeding into the very buildings in, and gestures with, which people live, its collapse is not sparked by an external force, but results in an implosion of the environment, buildings toppling, the ground tilting like a sinking ship, the body, mind and society breaking down, a whole world grinding towards sterility and inertia.

This is where Andersson's career as the 'world's greatest advertising director' (dit Bergman) comes in. Normally a career in advertising results in films of glossy shallowness. Andersson takes a theme of Fellinian decadence - think 'Satyricon', 'Casanova', 'Ship of Fools' - where a sophisticated society begins to decline, where immutable buildings begin to crumble, crowd hysteria is let loose, where public rites frame primitive barbarism (the sacrifice of young girls to appease the pagan gods) are all filmed like an Ikea advertisement, full of antiseptic sheen.

The film could be described as 'The FAst Show' directed by Bunuel. The narrative consists of connected, but self-contained vignettes or sketches with a recurring set of characters. Most of them would be simply funny jokes in a TV show - the magician who really saws a volunteer's chest etc. All have the concentrated brevity of an advert, all the visual imagination and surprise necessary to capture the viewer's attention. But what the film is advertising is the decline of a soulless consumer society, a society where the minimalist surroundings reflect minimalist humanity, where human relationships (especially in families) are grotesquely alienated.

Despite its post-modern sheen, the film's source are very - gloriously old-fashioned modernist or classic auteurist - Fellini (especially the scene at the airport, where the escapees are bogged down by bulging luggage), Dreyer (the sensitive poet gone mad because of his society); Godard (the apocalyptic traffic jam and barbaric bourgeois behaviour); Antonioni. BUt the presiding spirit is Bunuel, with the 'Milky Way'/'Phantom of Liberty'-like surrealist picaresque narrative, full of bourgeois-baiting and random violence; the 'Exterminating Angel' scene where the civic and clerical worthies are paralysed in the hotel, frothing like distempered dogs; the perverse anti-clericism that convincingly creates a vision of hell climaxing in an ambiguous scene of resurrection (the crouching crowd in the fields) and despair (the rubbish heap of crucifixes).

What Andersson truly shares with Bunuel, however, is a skewed comedy, never letting the Big Themes get in the way of the rich detail - the wonderful scene with the tramp, rats and ex-girlfriend especially. For all its alienated style and dehumanisation, 'Songs', like Bunuel, is devastatingly, humanly angry, and somehow very moving. the meticulous smoothness of the filming actually creates an oppressive violence in the viewer, a desire to smash the whole glasshouse down.

In the nineties, Belgium gave us two or rather three great directors: Jaco Van Dormael (the terrific "Toto the hero" 1991) and the Dardenne brothers. But the cinema of the latter is more realist and matter-of-fact. Furthermore, it evokes Ken Loach's with a difference: if Ken Loach presents the pains of Western society by introducing humor, it isn't the same thing with the Dardenne brothers where humor is absent.

For "the promise", the Dardenne brothers opted for neutrality and sobriety: short and quick dialogs, a film that essentially relies on the characters' gestures and countenances, no music, a vivid and rough directing that often shows the actors with back turned and especially a will to show a bleak social reality (the migrant workers' exploitation) and for this the movie almost takes a documentary aspect. The authors don't pass judgment, they don't feel pity. They just take a gritty and harsh look on these emigrants who live in dilapidated flats with a starvation wage. Besides, we can take down a significant detail: their hard living conditions echoes to a gray sky and it gives to the film a dull atmosphere.

An important point of the film is the relationship between Igor and his father. The beginning of the film presents a relationship between a father and his son that we could describe as complicity. At this moment, the movie becomes tinged with tenderness. But throughout the movie, this complicity gradually turns into an open opposition and the consequences of Igor's promise open his eyes on his fathers' cruelty.

"The promise" is also a movie that includes powerful moments because the suggested has the edge on the showed: Hammidou's mortal accident, the very last sequence of the movie when Igor decides to reveal the truth to Assita about her husband (we don't see her face but the simple view of her bent back makes us suggest her sadness.

The performance is also remarkable. Beginning with Jérémie Régnier who brings a lot of freshness to his character and the authors gave him the picture of a friendly boy. It is interesting to notice that he and "Rosetta" (1999) have a few common points. For example, they evolute in a tough environment. Moreover, Olivier Gourmet's awesome performance in the role of the father adds to the success of the film.

"The promise" shows the Dardenne's brothers' talent who are the main leaders of Belgian cinema.

The 1991 Belgian film "Toto le Heros" ("Toto the Hero") is a slick little expressionistic allegory which should be extremely depressing as it presents the process of living as a damned if you do-damned if you don't choice. And that choice as something which is made for each person by their basic nature and the events that shape their early life. The film follows two childhood neighbors who were born about the same time but into very different circumstances. Their parallel destinies occasionally touch each other and finally merge at the end, although the end is shown at the beginning and the story then told in a series of fluid non-linear flashbacks. It is the only film that begins with a person simultaneously choking on a sweet, being shot in the back, strangling in a curtain, and drowning?

While most of the flashbacks are done realistically there are some with an expressionistic style; those linked together by the catchy theme song "When Your Heart Goes Boom" are especially cool. Also noteworthy is the shelf of toy soldiers who march to their destruction as the plane's vibrations topple them off the edge.

Thomas Van Hasebroeck (teasingly nicknamed Van Chickensoup) is a lifelong dreamer because he fears action and commitment after his precocious sister (Alice) is killed because of his demands that she do something that will prove she still loves him. As an old man he finds himself filled with regret over lost opportunities and unfulfilled heroic dreams (insert the title here).

His counterpart, Alfred, lives life as a man of action and privilege, whose life of wrong choices leaves him with a lot of enemies and at least as many regrets as Thomas. From an early age Thomas envied Alfred, even concocting a fantasy about the two of them being switched at birth. Ironically, Alfred has lived his whole life envious of Thomas's seemingly unencumbered life.

Ultimately the story is less depressing than one would expect. In part because of a fair amount of humor and whimsy but also because of the introduction of a third alternative to living. Celestin is Thomas's developmentally disabled brother, content with just appreciating what life offers, an allegorical representation of the "stop and smell the roses" idea. Celestin is very loving and very much at peace with his existence, in one scene he is contently lying on the grass tuned into the movement of a mole tunneling in the ground beneath him.

Sandrine Blancke was especially good as Alice, whose sudden adolescence flowering leaves both Thomas and Alfred hopelessly in love with her; a love that will torment them both for the rest of their lives. My favorite scenes are Alice's determined confrontations with the Blessed Virgin after her father's disappearance.

A big strength of "Toto le Heros" is the directing. There is not a single weak performance, especially amazing because the main characters are portrayed by a succession of actors of differing ages. Writer-director Jaco Van Dormael and his make-up people are the real "Heros" as their physical casting and make-up effects provide utterly believable visual examples of each character at different life stages. It is like watching persons literally age before your eyes

The filmmakers here craft a taut, careful, and delicately strung together motion picture that relishes in its amazing development of mood, place, and character.

First, the mood: Haunting cinematography (rain falling on a small village at night, shadows darting across a thick field of grass, figures lurking in the woods, a masterfully choreographed hot pursuit scene on foot), a poignant music score (aided by the creepy use of a Korean pop song that accompanies each murder), and no-nonsense direction (peppered with fabulous doses of comic relief--how Shakespearan!) keep the film more and more intriguing at each turn and fascinating to watch.

Second, the place: South Korea, circa the late 1980's, and apparently under some sort of militia rule. This is inspired by the true story of Korea's first publicized (and still unsolved) serial killer case. This unique time and place serves as a wonderful respite from the typical American big-city setting of so many other films of this ilk.

Finally, the character development: The small details revealing the haunted souls of the detectives on the case is nothing short of brilliant. Witness the tiny executions of minutae: The cloth one rogue cop wraps around his boot so as not to leave scars when he kick-boxes suspects into submission, the harried chief of police checking his own blood pressure while trying to keep his off-the-cuff detectives in line or fighting to keep headline-starved reporters at bay, the young female officer desperately trying to showcase her abilities in crime solving between serving the chauvinistic detectives cups of fresh coffee, the outsider detective from Seoul's insistence that documents never lie (and the brutal irony at the climax that challenges his entire sense of being), and the main village detective's scathing speech on the difference between American FBI agents and Koren policemen. The beauty is in the details, and this film, like all the great ones, revels in their uncovering.

One flaw is that some might find the film a bit long in the tooth, but this is not to be missed for fans of serial killer thrillers and police procedural movies. For the Korean filmmakers, and the amazing cast...this is their master stroke.

Head On (Gegen die Wand), winner of the top prize "Golden Bear" at the 2004 Berlin Festival, is occasionally interrupted by a panoramic shot of a singer performing in front of a small Turkish orchestra on the banks of the Bosphorus across from Istanbul. It's a simple, at first incomprehensible, little device that provides punctuation and clarity amid the chaos and melodrama that otherwise dominate this story of a Turkish man in his forties and a twenty-year-old Turkish woman who meet in a psychiatric facility in Germany when both have attempted suicide -- he by crashing his car into a wall ("head on"), she by slitting her wrists. Cahit Tomruk (the sublimely attitudinizing Birol Ünel) is a purposeless rock 'n' roll loving boozer with a dead-end job collecting bottles at a club, and Sibel Güner (the wiry, intense Sibel Kikulli) is a young woman with conservative Turkish parents who wants to escape family pressures.

Both are total drama queens and both are German-born Turks. Cahit is more assimilated; his Turkish isn't even good. Sibel figures if he'll agree to marry her that'll get her away from her family. This is the irony of their situation: she must capitulate to the conventions of their culture in order to gain some freedom from it, and he must capitulate to society in order to get some sense of purpose. So they do get married -- he somehow passes muster with the stuffy family, baulking all the way -- and they eventually even fall in love. Her joie de vivre is exactly what he needs, and she's essentially just as wild in her way as he is in his -- but his nihilism and violence continue unabated and so does her promiscuity, and his brutal attack on one of her one night stands leads to jail and scandal, which in turn forces her to go to Istanbul. While he's incarcerated she writes him sustaining letters from Turkey -- their relationship, like the staid orchestra on the Bosphorus, is a stable element amid the surrounding chaos -- and after jail he goes to Turkey to find her.

To say this turbulent, brightly colored, lurid story is a "realistic picture of Turks in Germany" would be a total distortion of the truth. But somehow the situation of Cahit and Sibel reflects the unstable moods this half assimilated, half alien population experiences, and however melodramatic and unresolved the saga is, the two main characters are very well realized. The actors are strong, especially Birol Ünel, whose charismatic brooding and ravaged good looks make him irresistibly watchable. Both feel real to us -- he sardonic and gloomy, she dangerously spirited and full of life-- despite her dramatic suicide attempts, of which there's more than one. The story, as much as the images through which it's told, is both dark and vibrant.

We need the Brechtian, Greek-chorus device of those orchestral interludes on the Bosphorus, though: without an occasional break the drama and darkness would be too much. We also need to go with the flow of this movie, and not expect it to be more polished or more organized, or even better looking, than it is. It looks unlike most films we're seeing now, but that doesn't mean the cinematographer hasn't done the best possible job. What it has is life, tumultuous with incident, strong personalities, and a milieu we've not seen before. There's also a loud, authentic-feeling rock-pop soundtrack and a cunning contrast between Cahit's punk-rock sensibility and Sibel's love of good grooming and dance. Arguably the movie is too long, but that length gives it the feel of a saga, which it must have, because that's what it is, the confused, tawdry epic of a generation. Like all first films by a whole subculture, it has a lot to talk about. When Sibel and Cahit discover they still love each other, after everything, it's the Turkish Germans discovering that they have self-worth. The last scenes are open-ended: this generation's future is anybody's guess.

Considered by many to be the last "classic" noir film ever made, and perhaps the last masterwork from child prodigy Orson Welles, who looks about sixty in this film, despite his 42 years. In TOUCH OF EVIL the "noirish" dark streets and shadows are darker than ever, practically swallowing up the soft tones like a murky swamp. The action takes place in a nondescript U.S./Mexico border town where the worst that both sides has to offer is most in evidence. The famous opening scene (a 3 1/2-minute continuous shot) where we witness a time bomb being placed in the trunk of a Cadillac is masterful. The camera pulls in and out of the city scene as it follows the motion of the vehicle winding its way through streets littered with pedestrians, thus effectively creating a level of anxiety that could not be duplicated with multiple edits. After the inevitable explosion, the drama dives into a seedy world of corrupt police justice and malevolent decrepitude, which is filmed with such a stylish flair, it is almost weirdly humorous and playful! Mike Vargas, the good guy, is played by Charlton Heston and seems more than a wee bit miscast as a Mexican narcotics officer with his face darkened by makeup. When U.S. Police Captain Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) first meets him he remarks, "He doesn't look Mexican." Quinlan is the ultimate repugnant cop gone bad and Welles has the camera looking up into his nostrils most of the time making his character look even more monstrous. But Quinlan is also pitifully sad. A man who once had the instincts of a cat and the intelligence of a fox has been reduced to an insignificant mass of tissue, who's "instinct" is having a knack for finding evidence that he himself has planted. And while he may be revered by the local officials in law enforcement, he's acutely aware that he is a fraud and petrified that Vargas, has seen him naked.

"Pepe le Moko" 's screenplay is so simple it's a wonder Duvivier could make such a masterwork from such a script.More than the story itself,it's the atmosphere which matters ,and a bevy of colorful characters surrounding the hero,played by the director's favorite actor Jean Gabin :one often forgets that it's Duvivier who launched Gabin,the most famous French star of the era (and maybe of all time)in such works as "la bandera" (1935)and "la belle equipe" (1936).

"Pepe " takes place in Algiers ,in some kind of ghetto" la casbah" .the hero is a gangster who reigns in this underground world ,but we soon discover he is actually a prisoner:a cop,like a spider on its web, is waiting for him to leave his refuge to arrest him.Duvivier's camera work is dazzling ,using panoramic shots which depicts la casbah as a maze ;when Pepe finally leaves the place ,the background behind him becomes blurred ,then merges with the sea,the gate of freedom.More than a gangster story ,it's a tale of nostalgia.Pepe falls in love with a woman (Mireille Balin) "from the outside world" while talking with her about different places in Paris,ending with la place blanche where they both belong.There 's the harrowing sequence where a has-been chanteuse (Frehel) plays one of her records on a gramophone ,thinks of her glorious past,and sings the chorus with her youth's voice as her tears fall down.

This is a grim film to watch, overflowing with brutality of both the physical and the mental types, but the journey is worth it due to the overwhelmingly fine performance by Marko Kovacevic.Marko is in the middle of the death of his family as a unit. His father is a deadbeat drunk who plays the lotto and hopes to win. His mother moves about in a haze and his sister gives him an excruciating amount of abuse for the hell of it. School is no better: there is Levi, the school thug who leads a gang, who has decided to focus his anger on him. And a teacher, originally from Bosnia (considered sacrilegious of in this country) who sees hope in Marko's sensitive writing and thinks his poetry might be the express way out of this hell, into the promise of Paris.

Paris indeed arrives, in a moment of hope, as a young mercenary of sorts -- a man who has lived a dangerous life. As Marko retreats from his daily dose of abuse into an abandoned train, he meets and befriends this man who comes to teach Marko two things: that life is hopeless and a constant battle, and to eat or be eaten (the movie's tagline). As the mental and physical violence around and directed at Marko escalates and even those who had hope in him decide to turn the other face as the ones in power (Levi and his police father) gain so much control that it seems all roads of escape end at their feet, Marko takes a drastic action into his own hands.

This kind of story is not new. I think the director is trying to, in telling a story of the loss of hope, an allegory about how innocence -- the future (Marko) -- can take so much before crying out and lashing at those who try to help but cannot (Marko's teacher, who didn't even assist him when Levi and his gang beat him up at his doorstep but fled the scene). I did wonder if the introduction of Paris and Marko's transformation from golden haired boy into a killing machine was a foreshadowing of what Marko would become -- since he walks away from it all right at the end while no one even flinches to see what took place. Paris, the soldier, has told Marko not to expect anything from anyone, that the only way of leaving a bad situation is leaving, not hoping, and this is exactly what Marko in the end is implied as doing.MIRAGE reflects the reality of many victims of society who have no one to help them, who have been pushed so far and then beyond the edge until they embrace the darkness of life. I kept getting slight references to a Mexican film by Luis Bunuel -- LOS OLVIDADOS in which innocence was also stolen and turned into something ugly