Part of the BFI's intriguing "A History Of The Avant-Garde" series, this is 66 minutes of decaying, nitrate-film archive footage, an artful collage in which figures deteriorate as we watch. Obviously, it's heavily symbolic: nuns, children, boxers go about their endeavours unaware (or are they?) of the oblivion that looms. The dissonant score's a drag, but this is nothing if not haunting.
In 1980, one year before Anthony Burgess composed a whole new language for Quest For Fire, the producers of this dumbass Neanderthal comedy achieved much the same effect by just having actors go "oog". Insanely, Ringo Starr plays a horny caveman who forms his own tribe of losers (a young Dennis Quaid among them) and gets into scrapes. A must-have for Beatles completists; for everyone else, the animated dinosaurs are sweet. (DL)
DVD EXTRAS: None.
Based on the Kurt Vonnegut novel and featuring an amazing central performance from Nick Nolte as an American spy living in pre-WWII Berlin, broadcasting military secrets in code under the guise of anti-Semitic, Nazi propaganda. Once the war is over, though, he's arrested for war crimes and put on trial. Will the truth out? A mixture of the disturbing and the bizarre, it's both haunting and thought-provoking. John Goodman co-stars.
Directed at mercilessly cool, wickedly tense pace by René Clément, the original 1960 French adaptation of Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley pisses from on high all over the Anthony Minghella remake. As Ripley, the ambiguous sociophobe planning to steal dissolute playboy Maurice Ronet's life in a blazing Mediterranean, Alain Delon has never looked so much like a saint made of ice. Delon versus Matt Damon? Where's the contest?
Given short shrift by most cinema critics, Robert Benton's flawed adaptation of Philip Roth's novel is wonderfully acted by two stars who've been praised for far inferior performances. Anthony Hopkins is the professor sacked for alleged political incorrectness; Nicole Kidman the damaged younger woman with whom he enjoys "not my first love, not my great love, but my last love." Both risky and tender.
A landmark in the development of the doomed anti-hero, Julien Duvivier's timeless 1936 proto-noir made an icon of Jean Gabin, playing Pépé, the legendary French gangster exiled to the baroque, shadow-strewn purgatory of the Algerian casbah. Falling for a female tourist, he decides the time's come to break for home, but the cops are waiting. Still surprising, tough and casual, it sashays the line between cynicism and romance like few others.
Excellent, thought-provoking love triangle drama, with Mark Ruffalo for once living up to his overcooked reputation. He's entwined in a threesome at college, but years down the line all the participants have evolved... except him. About to marry, he craves a rekindling of the flame. Not wise. Writer/director Austin Chick keeps it sparky and twisting like a fish, always a jump ahead of you.
Muddled straight-to-DVD sequel to the 2000 classic. As in part one, a class of schoolchildren are sent to an island to fight or die for the pleasure of their elders. But this time they're battling the survivors of the first film, who've formed a guerrilla army dedicated to overthrowing the sadistic adults responsible. After a promising start, it never recovers from the death of veteran director Kenji Fukasaku during the shoot.
Nine out of ten people will tell you Pam Grier starred in this 1973 landmark blaxploitation 'classic'. She didn't: it's Tamara Dobson as the CIA's tough female agent, taking out drug dealers with athleticism, attitude and a healthy amount of sheer spite. The soundtrack is very cool but in truth the film's pretty rubbish: comic-book at best, lazily indulgent throughout. Bring on Foxy Brown!
