John Waters' first 'mainstream' film from 1988 was to be the last bow for underground star Divine, on epic form as the mother of the rebellious Tracy Turnblad (Ricki Lake, making her debut), who becomes a dance star on a teen TV show circa 1962 before transforming into a beatnik civil rights activist. Also featuring extraordinary cameos from Pia Zadora, Debbie Harry and Sonny Bono, this is an utter delight.
Stanley Kramer's star-studded 1961 version of the Nuremberg Trials sees Burt Lancaster as a German collaborator, Spencer Tracy as a US judge, and has cameos for practically everyone else: Marlene Dietrich, Richard Widmark, Montgomery Clift and Judy Garland. The latter two, emaciated and tattered, provide unintentionally ghoulish viewing, but the flick itself is a tad worthy.
Neil LaBute had gone off the boil, but this low-budget version of his own stage play (with the same cast, including Rachel Weisz and Paul Rudd, who'd acted in London and Broadway) is a quite brilliant examination of the evil women do, a kind of flipside to In The Company Of Men. It's also a clever debate about the interface between creativity and love or sex. Weisz relishes the chance to be acid on legs.
This stunningly realised 1962 restaging of D-Day is the last great war epic. The stars include John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Robert Ryan, Rod Steiger, Sean Connery and a wounded Richard Burton, but the greatest stretches come on the inclement grey Normandy beaches, where General Robert Mitchum tries to lead his beleaguered men up the dunes, and get his cigar to light.
Slow-moving account of the events leading up to the execution of King Charles I (Rupert Everett) and its aftermath, focusing on the stormy friendship of rebel leaders Oliver Cromwell (Tim Roth) and General Thomas Fairfax (Dougray Scott). Despite lavish period detail, a good supporting cast and an excellent performance from Everett, the leaden and historically dubious script renders this duller than the driest of documentaries.
Classic 'revisionist' western from '71, Peter Fonda's directorial debut is bookended by two acts of fumbling, clumsy yet brutally violent gunplay, but is otherwise concerned with the delicately evolving relationships between two wandering cowboys (Fonda and Warren Oates) and Fonda's once abandoned wife (Verna Bloom). The photography from Vilmos Zsigmond (McCabe & Mrs Miller) is worth the price of the DVD in itself.
In Clint Eastwood's self-consciously stately film of Dennis Lehane's cracking thriller, Sean Penn, Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon are former childhood friends, estranged by trauma, thrown into adult conflict by tragedy following the murder of Penn's teenage daughter. The novel is raw, seething, but Eastwood's stern, sober direction makes the film a bit of a slog, worthy but oddly unengaging, stripped of tension and the true sense of place Lehane brought to the book.
A stimulating and intriguing set of classic shorts from the directing Premier League. Early work from Godard, Von Trier, Moodysson, Kieslowski, Moretti and Leconte sits with maverick inspiration alongside Brits like Peter Mullan and one Chris Morris (the BAFTA-winning "My Wrongs"). Three hours plus in total, but each nugget boasts such energy that it flies by. Small is beautiful.
In the late eighties that poster adorned every young man's wall, and not just because the French subtitle looked chic. However, those who sneer at Jean-Jacques Beineix's film (here available on DVD only through HMV shops), putting its charm down simply to Béatrice Dalle's deeply erotic mouth (and suchlike), miss the point. Yes, it's visually ravishing throughout (as the pinnacle of the Cinéma Du Look) but it also lives by the true definition of Romantic Art, which has tragic connotations.
A single indiscretion with a besotted servant (a young Toshirô Mifune) starts an inexorable downward spiral for young noblewoman O-Haru. Disgraced, she and her parents are sent into exile, but it soon becomes clear that a woman with a tarnished reputation has very little chance of making good in 17th-century feudal Japan. With ravishing black-and-white cinematography and an austere formality in the direction, Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 masterpiece is a beautifully crafted example of a past era in Japanese film-making.
