Worth a look: Paul Schrader directs a Harold Pinter adaptation of an Ian McEwan novel, in Venice, in 1990. Rupert Everett and Natasha Richardson are trying to revive their marriage on holiday, but fall under the sinister influence of sadomasochists Christopher Walken and Helen Mirren. Venice is deeply cinematic, but Schrader opts for much nudity and is clearly in love with Everett. Creepy.
In Wolfgang Becker's entirely beguiling movie, a young East German goes to extraordinary lengths to convince his mother the world hasn't changed while she's been in a coma—which means somehow covering up the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of Communism. A beautifully realised humanistic comedy.
Filmed in '76, the conclusion to Roman Polanski's evil-rooms trilogy returns to the urban paranoia and fracturing psyches of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. Polanski—who'd just taken up residence in France—himself plays the vulnerable, mouse-like new occupant of a forlorn Paris apartment, whose creeping schizophrenia grows as he feels himself falling under the influence of the previous resident, a female suicide victim. A perverse slow-dazzle.
Throughout cinema history there have been certain flashpoints, the sparks produced when a director and an actor recognise in each other their alter ego: Ford and Wayne; Scorsese and De Niro. Perhaps the most intense of these has been the extraordinary collaborations between German visionary Werner Herzog and the fabled maniac who became his artistic double and evil twin, the late Klaus Kinski.
This incredible set chronicles their tempestuous relationship via the five features they made together.
Confused and rather dull boy-loses-girl story which inexplicably got some pant-wetting reviews. The greatly admired David Gordon Green loosely introduces us to the small-town Romeo and younger college girl who fall in love, only for her brother to kick up a rumpus and for her to break hearts. It's all wilfully vague and indecisive, and her infidelity doesn't make sense. Terrence Malick meets Dawson's Creek.
