When Nancy Sinatra performed in Oslo in 2002, Norwegian newspaper VG carried a front-page photo with the headline "Tragic". Yet when she performed this year at Morrissey's Meltdown in London, a wander through the auditorium during the legendary "These Boots Were Made For Walking"elicited scenes reminiscent of a walkabout by Robbie Williams. Style rules over substance, in the capital at least. And it's undoubtedly style rather than content that's on show on this quasi-comeback album, for which she dresses herself in the musical equivalent of the finest threads.
Jean Cocteau's 1949 reworking of the myth of Orpheus (Jean Marais) portrays him as a beat poet torn between his art, his wife (Marie Déa) and the love of Death (Maria Casares) herself. The effects are a miracle of low-budget ingenuity, the dream-like imagery unforgettable: mysterious motorcycling assassins, poetry from beyond the grave on the radio, and all mirrors lead to the Underworld. A masterpiece.
OPENS AUGUST 27, CERT 15, 93 MINS
Here's Colin Firth, trying to banish forever the memory of being "television's Mr Darcy", teaming up with Resurrection Man and My Little Eye director Marc Evans to make something edgy and intense, a dark psychological thriller. With ants. Oh, dear.
Colin plays Ben, left comatose following a car crash in which his wife died. Recently awoken, he now lives in a Gothicky converted hospital in grim old east London, with nothing but an ant farm for company and Mena Suvari as his neighbour. Ben starts having visions of his dead wife.
DIRECTED BY Richard Linklater
STARRING Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy
Opens July 30, Cert 15, 80 mins
Released in 1995, Richard Linklater's Eurodrama Before Sunrise was a charming holiday romance, a post-grunge Brief Encounter. Reuniting the same actors/characters nine years on, this sequel feels more like a Lost In Translation for the Middle Youth generation, with the same tone but higher emotional stakes.
The Vietnam war had been over for three years by the time Hal Ashby made Coming Home in 1978. Those who'd survived the combat zones of South-East Asia had returned to find themselves shunned and quarantined, like lepers in their home towns; a living, breathing reminder of a shameful war many back home would rather forget had ever happened. Some of those who came back perhaps wished they'd died out there in the jungles—the paraplegics, the traumatised, forever dreading the nameless, shapeless things that whispered to them in the night.
Filmed shortly before her death, this extended reminiscence from Traudl Junge about her time working for Hitler promises more than it delivers. Junge opens with a doubtless sincere condemnation of Hitler for his evil-doings and reproaches herself for failing to recognise the evil in him. You suspect she's still a little starstruck and her recollections of him depict a kind man, albeit with a lot on his mind. Banal, unilluminating.
