Another reworking of the Betty Blue mythology, with the always watchable Valeria Golino as the Sicilian free spirit who is deemed nuts by her husband and run out of town for such sins as spontaneity and unconventionality. Sun-baked scenery and a lurch into magical realism at the end makes it more than the sum of its parts.
Up there with Citizen Kane as a standard bearer for the medium, and still utterly compulsive. FW Murnau's first US movie, dating from 1927, deploys a battery of impressive camera techniques in telling the story of a steadfast family man seduced by Margaret Livingston's femme fatale.
A fascinating study in waning star power disguised as a cop movie, disguised as a comedy, this reveals the Harrison Ford screen persona at its most intransigent, here playing a 'big dog' cop who hates rap music and yoga, punches people, solves murders and sleeps with Lena Olin.
Seamus McGarvey is proving himself to be the UK's finest director of photography, and this visual poem owes its beauty to his eye. A fable following a man as he looks back over his life, from rural Ireland to modern London, it's like Cronenberg's Spider with the imagination turned up to 11.
High plains drifter is Clint Eastwood, the nascent director, at his most elemental. He's post-Leone and pre-Josey Wales here, working from a script by Ernest Shaft Tidyman, playing a "squinty-eyed son of a bitch"who saves a small town in the Old West from a sadistic group of escaped convicts. It's a harsh, frequently brutal amorality play. The credits have barely rolled before we're treated to callous multiple murders and a 'consenting rape'scene.
Australian comedy starring Billy Connolly as fisherman Steve Myers, whose boat is destroyed by a lightning bolt. When the insurance company refuses to pay up, claiming the incident was an "act of God", Myers decides to take God to court and sue Him for damages. Judi Davis plays a local reporter who champions Myers' case (and wins his heart). No surprises here, but it's amiable enough.
Also released this month...
Shining like a beacon in the depressing pre-Christmas landscape of mouldy old video collections and dodgy concert films is Jane's Addiction's Three Days SANCTUARY
Filmed by Carter Smith and Kevin Ford on the band's 1997 Relapse tour, it's a fully-realised piece of rock cinema that dramatically transcends the limitations of your average tour documentary.