King Lear re-enacted in modern-day Liverpool as crime boss Richard Harris, broken by the senseless murder of wife Lynn Redgrave, splits his empire between his two black-hearted daughters. The dialogue's got a touch of the Guy Ritchies and the violence is silly, but Harris—cunning, lean, leonine—commands the screen.
Keaton-esque Palestinian comedian Elia Suleiman's sporadically successful and loosely-bound compendium of sketches Divine Intervention features two lovers, from Ramallah and Jerusalem, who pass their romance at an Israeli checkpoint while a surreal world of humorous vignettes pass before them—some of which are sublime (like the Yasser Arafat balloon), others unsophisticated (like the Palestinian ninja who dispatches five Israeli henchmen).
Great fun for surfers, but—considering it's made up entirely of scenic beaches and hotties in bikinis—crashingly inane tedium for the rest of us. A kind of Pointless Break for girls, directed by John Stockwell, it stars Kate Bosworth as the teen rebel surfer who wants to be just like all the other teen rebel surfers. A Ladyshave ad in thin disguise.
Antonio Banderas and Lucy Liu play secret agents who start out on opposite sides, then realise they should be allies. The script and plot barely make it out of the first dimension, the stunts are contrived and irritating and one can only assume the stars were blackmailed into taking part. A strong contender for worst movie of the year.
Pristine restoration of Bruce Lee's only movie as star, director, writer and producer, released to mark the 30th anniversary of his death. He's a country boy come to the city, in this case Rome, where he must kung-fu kick the collective badass of gangsters trying to take over a Chinese restaurant. Not Lee's best, but it does have nunchakus and that great, no-frills fight with a hairy Chuck Norris in the Colosseum.
Robert Aldrich's blazing adaptation of Mickey Spillane's gut-wrenching nuclear age potboiler turns a well-worn genre on its head and retains its power to shock almost 50 years after it was made. Ralph Meeker yells his way through this movie as the quintessential Mike Hammer: loud, boorish, sexist, bullying and gleefully violent. Watch out for the back-to-front titles and apocalyptic climax. Truly the greatest private-eye movie ever made.
It doesn't matter whether you're a fan. This study of Mitchell is a model of musical biography in DVD form. Over two hours we get her life story in perfectly matched words, music and images. The interviews with Mitchell are candid, the recollections from the likes of James Taylor, David Crosby and Graham Nash are fascinating, and the musical excerpts, which cover her entire career, are luminous.
Recorded during a series of gigs in Japan with his band The Oddballs two weeks before he died of a heroin overdose in April 1991, Who's Been Talking offers a voyeuristic insight into the twilight world of Thunders. Gaunt and deathly pale, the wonder is how he played at all, for he'd been immediately hospitalised on arrival in the country. He summons a chaotic-narcotic energy during a set of more than 20 songs. But there's a ghoulish irony to hearing him sing "Sad Vacation", his Sid Vicious tribute.
A booted and suited Cave looks disarmingly like a door-to-door evangelist in this live French show from 2001. The intensity of his earlier work has of late been tempered by a more pensive, hymn-like calm and it's the latter which is to the fore in a set that concentrates on the No More Shall We Part album. Yet it's older material such as "The Mercy Seat" and "Saint Huck" which provide most of the highlights.
