Arthur Penn's smouldering anti-western tells the story of Nicholson's Montana horse-rustlers and the pursuit of them by Brando's regulator Lee Clayton. The action is rationed into short, ferocious bursts and used as a counterpoint to the director's paced dissection of power and politics on the anarchic frontier. Brando's whispering Irish accent flirts with parody, but ultimately helps to lend Clayton a compelling air of psychotic menace.
Errol Morris' latest Oscar-winning documentary is no Moore-style polemic but an artful interrogation of infamous US Defence Secretary Robert McNamara, who gave Morris 23 hours of filmed interviews in 2001, before 9/11 and the Iraq war, though unspoken parallels are hard to ignore. A formidable intellectual bruiser at 87, the old Cold Warrior seizes what may prove to be his last chance to make peace with history. Riveting.
Mega-rock festival staged in Toronto in July 2003, where a bizarre line-up included The Isley Brothers, AC/DC, Justin Timberlake and The Rolling Stones. A voiceover drones on about how Toronto needed a "big idea" to restore its confidence after the city's SARS crisis, but this event is pretty average, and Timberlake's duet with Jagger on "Miss You" is, weirdly, the highlight.
A decade ago, Heather Nova burst forth as a kind of female Jeff Buckley. She's never quite fulfilled the promise but is a hugely popular live act. Her understated backing band are superb, but it's her soaring vocals that grab the attention at this show dating from September 2003, which concentrates mainly on material from her most recent album, Storm, and suggests she's toned down some of her earlier jagged edges.
Recorded at the LA Troubadour in 2000—and gaps like that never bode well. Though it covers moments when the band were at their defiant best—"Olympian", "For The Dead", "Fighting Fit"—it still feels like they're going through the motions. And that's a shame as Gene always had a lot more to them than their ill-deserved reputation as Britpop fops. Worth seeing for what could have been.
The memory of Dennis Potter is not well-served by this inferior feature version of the fine '80s BBC TV series that confirmed Potter as one of Britain's most original and daring screenwriting talents. Here, Robert Downey Jr takes the Michael Gambon role of Dan Dark, the chronically ill pulp fiction writer who, delirious in hospital, finds reality merging with the fantasy world of his novels.
Shot in 1929 by German émigré EA Dupont, this sinuous, shimmering melodrama centres on a London nightclub where the sensuous table-top shimmy of scullery girl Sho-Sho (Anna May Wong) catches her boss' eye. Under his patronage, she's toast of the town, but stirs murderous passions. Flitting between glittering Jazz Age highlife and foul Limehouse backstreets, it exudes an atmosphere of almost illicit potency.
Denys Arcand reunites the Quebecois characters who made '86's The Decline Of The American Empire so witty and engaging, and despite their age, disillusion and failing health, they're as intellectually provocative as before. Yes, it's talky, but as one lies dying, his friends reminisce about days of drugs and libido, and his son finds a backbone. A moving, note-perfect Oscar-winner.
