Worth a look: Paul Schrader directs a Harold Pinter adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel, in Venice, in 1990. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are trying to revive their marriage on holiday, but fall under the sinister influence of sadomasochists Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren. Venice is deeply cinematic, but Schrader opts for much nudity and is clearly in love with Everett. Creepy.
Controversial in its day (1967), Joseph Strick's bold stab at Joyce's unfilmable novel was (echoing the book) banned in Ireland until as recently as 2001. This year will see the 100th anniversary of "Bloomsday": as a warm-up, watch this intriguing, prescient art movie, vividly stalking Bloom and Dedalus around Dublin, then committing the last half hour to Molly (Barbara Jefford) and her lusty soliloquy.
One of the turkeys which derailed Peter Bogdanovich's career. Hubris-fuelled on the back of runaway success, he cast other half Cybill Shepherd as the Henry James heroine who flits around 19th-century Europe falling in love and dying. The costumes are fine, but there's no feel for what was anyway a mediocre James story, and no momentum. Cybill's a fish out of water. A pretty folly.
In tandem with her recent, more rock-oriented collaborative albums (corralling everyone from Damon Albarn and Jarvis Cocker to Billy Corgan), Faithfull has pursued her other career as a torch singer, the regal ruin of her pristine '60s folk voice now the perfect expression of seen-it-all wisdom/ennui. In the company of pianist Paul Trueblood and at the end of a world tour (recorded at the International Jazz Festival in '97), she's bawdy, wry and always wrenchingly expressive: in short, quite the best exponent of this sort of thing.
In Wolfgang Becker's entirely beguiling movie, a young East German goes to extraordinary lengths to convince his mother the world hasn't changed while she's been in a coma—which means somehow covering up the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. A beautifully realised humanistic comedy.
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.
