It all feels as dynamic and mould-breaking as it did 10 years ago. ER has kept itself fresh with regular transfusions of new characters, but it's amazing how good the original cast was (take a bow Noah Wyle, Sherry Stringfield; Anthony Edwards and that Clooney guy). And we forget how radical ER's multiple-stories-on-the-fly technique was, using long, fluent steadicam shots to give shape to a maze of powerful interlocking narratives. Holby City, get stuffed.
Eric Rohmer's 1981 movie stars Béatrice Romand as Sabine, a twentysomething Parisienne who, fleeing an unhappy affair, resolves to find and wed Mr Right. Meeting Edmond, a young lawyer, she promptly decides she's got her man, and is soon obsessed with the idea of their getting married—little realising that Edmond fails to second that emotion. Meticulously assembled and exquisitely performed, it's a tart, gently mocking but poignant parable.
Five photogenic college chums, one backwoods cabin, a local villager with his flesh peeling off and something nasty in the water. Eli Roth's visceral, wicked and witty bloodbath evokes George Romero panics and Evil Dead riots gone by, yet retains a strong enough sense of itself to remain more than merely the sum of its faultless influences. A (decaying) head and shoulders above other recent attempts at '70s-esque late-night retro-horror.
So-so sci-fi rom-com from John Carpenter, with Chevy Chase as a stockbroker who gets caught in a nuclear accident that turns him invisible; Daryl Hannah plays his love interest, Sam Neill the CIA heavy chasing him. Totally dependent on hackneyed visual gags and special effects that were superseded long ago, what remains is indulgent fluff.
A Kyoto skyscraper is contrasted with a crematorium chimney, gravestones abound, as do sinister black crows. And yet despite the lugubrious undertow of this, Yasujiro Ozu's penultimate movie (made two years before his death), there's a warmth to the tale of the Kohayagawa family, their ailing business and their eccentric patriarch that somehow transforms post-war angst into sublime acceptance.
Watching the fabbest of all fours in their first US press conference, puffing away on cigs and deflecting inane enquiries, you feel proud to be a Brit. "Sing something for us!"
"No, we need money first."
Could Justin Timberlake—or Julian Casablancas, for that matter—be half as sarcastic?
Imagine waking from a 40-year coma and coming afresh to these extraordinary scenes: four scouse charmers off the plane with their matching suits and Pan Am shoulder bags.
Filmed in '76, the conclusion to Roman Polanski's evil-rooms trilogy returns to the urban paranoia and fracturing psyches of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Polanski—who'd just taken up residence in France—himself plays the vulnerable, mouse-like new occupant of a forlorn Paris apartment, whose creeping schizophrenia grows as he feels himself falling under the influence of the previous resident, a female suicide victim. A perverse slow-dazzle.
Another Cavalry Movie from Ford, and this time Johnny Reb's in the firing line as Yankee Colonel Wayne leads his troops on a demolition mission and kidnaps feisty southern belle Constance Towers. Here Ford's portentous 'Civil War is Hell' message doesn't quite gel with his trademark tomfoolery-drunken gags, funny fistfights and casual misogyny. The resulting film is strangely blank.
