OPENS APRIL 11, CERT 15, 77 MINS
Damien Odoul's debut feature is a coming-of-age film with a difference. Shot in black and white, full of violent and surreal imagery, it has more in common with the movies of Buñuel and Vigo or Arthur Rimbaud's poetry than with any conventional teen movie. Alienated teenager David (Pierre-Louis Bonnetblanc) lives on a remote French farm with his uncle. The older farm hands decide to get him drunk for the first time.
Described by its proto-feminist French director Virginie Despentes as an attempt "to seize woman's true sexuality back from the male gaze", Baise-Moi is therefore a visceral, explicit re-imagining of the road movie (Thelma And Louise with cum shots), buffered by chunks of jaded '70s film theory. Too inept to be engaging, too light to be controversial. A mess.
Intense Israeli thriller merging politics, religion and thwarted romance in which Rabbi Meltzer (Assi Dayan) encourages his soldier students to embrace martyrdom. A huge hit on home turf, it's fiery spirit ensures it translates.
Magisterial, tough-hearted 1967 western from writer/director Tom Gries. Charlton Heston is a revelation as the eponymous ageing cowhand, a lonesome, unemployed illiterate, bushwhacked by deranged preacher Donald Pleasence and his boys. While recovering, he encounters Joan Hackett, who, although travelling through the wilderness to join her husband, offers the chance of a life he's never known.
